Florence Herget

Interviewee: Florence Herget
Interviewer: Mark Durtschi
 
Mark Durtschi: This is Mark Durtschi; we are in Florence Herget’s home. It is the 18th of June 1996, it is her turn for her interview and she has been doing quite a bit of thinking about the things that she wants to talk about. Florence was born December the 12th 1923 in Augden, shortly thereafter she moved up here to Canada. Rather than me telling the story for her, why don’t you tell your own story?

Florence Herget: I didn’t come to Stirling until I was married July the 21st of 1943. I wasn’t born up here, my mother and dad met in the mission field and was married and came up here when I was born. She went back to Augden and I was born there. For early development of Stirling I wasn’t here so I don’t know very much about that. Ronnie said that it was exceptionally fast developing. There were a lot of Stores; you could buy almost anything that you wanted to buy.

Mark Durtschi: Let me point out that when Ms. Herget says Ronnie she is talking about her husband Moroni.

Florence Herget: I guess as more people came and cars became available and went to Lethbridge. Now there aren’t many stores here, they had a lumberyard; you could buy clothes almost anything that you wanted. People ordered what furniture or whatever they wanted from catalogues came in on the train. When we got married we lived in the front two rooms of his mothers house, we lived there for ten years until we built out here. We are on a farm now two miles west of Stirling. His mothers place is still there, it was sold; Albert got married and lived in it for several years. He remodelled it and lived there for several years. In about 1966 he sold and went to Coaldale. He sold to a fellow by the name of Blunt. They were there for fifteen to twenty years. When they sold Brent, Johnny’s boy was looking for a place and he was able to get a hold of that. Now it is back in the Herget hands. About Agriculture, years ago from the time that we got married in 1942 and after for quite some time they used to have to go way up to the head gates to get water, up by highway 52. They had to wade out into the lake and open the gates and turn water down. The irrigation company has changed and taken over all of the ditches and everything is bone dry that is a relief. All we have to do is turn a little wheel that opens the gate and then shut it off when you are finished. The effect of the canal on the family and village, I wasn’t here I don’t know when the water first came. They had a family community pasture when I was here and for quite a while after there were boys on horse back that in the morning would gather up the cows and take them out to the pasture and then take them back at night. You had so much time to get your gates open and get all of your cows in. I guess that the Herget’s raised potatoes, beets, hay, wheat, barley, and oats, some flax. The sugar beets were a life saver for people around Stirling and Raymond. That gave a lot of people work both in the factory and raising the beets. Now we have lost the factory. We didn’t have running water until we built out here. When we built we had a well drilled, it was a flowing well. It didn’t go down very deep, forty eight to fifty feet. We had that piped into the house and put a bathroom in. The water is good except it has a lot of rust in it. Most people don’t like the taste of it but we have got used to it and we like it. It is hard to get rid of the water, if you use a lot of bathwater there is not a lot of drainage for it, we are too flat. We have to be careful with that. We never had a bathroom before, when it was bath night we just hauled buckets in and put them on the stove and bathed in a round bath tub.

Mark Durtschi: Did everybody use the same water?

Florence Herget: No, we never did. Some people do, we were skimpy on it but we always had our own bath water. One time not long after we were married the old shoemaker, he used to drive around with two white horses and a little cart of some kind. I remember one time his cart broke out in front of our place and we had coals stoves, he wanted to heat an iron to fix his wagon. I didn’t like the idea of him coming in the house but he got his wagon fixed. He was a funny little guy, he was brown, he never wore a shirt in the summer, and his back was baked as brown as could be. Before we got electricity, his folks had electricity but we always used lamp light. We used coal oil lamps.

Mark Durtschi: When did you get electricity about out here?

Moroni Herget: About 1928.

Mark Durtschi: Oh, I thought you were talking about your farm out here.

Florence Herget: No, we had electricity when we first moved out here. The wood burning stoves, we were used to them and we didn’t think anything about it. In the winter we kept it going all day long for heat. In the summer we let it go out when we were ready to eat you got wood and got it going. It heated the house well in the summer. About Halloween, it was toilet tipping time, not too many other pranks were played at the time that was the main thing. We had cows; they had horses before they got rid of them when we got married. When we came out here we had chickens and started raising turkeys, enough for our own use. I guess that is about all we had out here. We got rid of our cows so we didn’t have to milk, that was a headache. We were married a couple of years and Sheldon was born. Then about two and half years Darlene was born. Then it was quite a while before Wayne and Dale came. Darlene was born in 1948, Wayne was born in 1954 and Dale in 1957. The kids had to help wash dishes and dry dishes. We planted trees around, they weren’t too big but they had to hold the trees. They had the coops to clean. We had raspberries and strawberries; they had to help pick them. They mowed lawns. They had to keep their own room clean, they were suppose to make their beds in the morning and sometimes it got made and sometimes it didn’t. The old pool hall in Stirling, I don’t know anything about the pool hall, I was never in it or had anything to do with it. I remember when Jack Hicken came here he was the school teacher and he went into the pool hall, Bill Eaves was in there. Bill told Jack that he might be a school teacher but when you come in here you are just one of us. He thought that was pretty good and he felt good about it, he felt like he belonged. I don’t remember any in Stirling. My dad was selling pigs when the depression had just hit. He got his wagons all ready to go in the morning to Taber and sell pigs. When he hooked onto them in the morning the wheels all fell off. Halloween kids had come and take the bolts out of the wheels. I was seven when I started school. That was a mistake, it was a country school down by Taber and when I was coming six they said that I could start if I wanted to. My dad took me to school and the teacher told me how much fun we would have then dad said do you want to stay or do you want to come home. I turned around and went home with him. I have always regretted that. It was a country school, one teacher for eight grades. She was the janitor, she was everything. She had discipline. I remember getting the strap because I couldn’t read “Baby Bear mends his Chair”. She was good though, she had a lot of good ways, and she kept good discipline and kept the building really neat. She had a lot of good ways.

Mark Durtschi: What would she do with the boys?

Florence Herget: She would give them the strap, some of them got it almost every day. She would get her strap; about two inches wide and a foot long, she said hold your hand out.

Mark Durtschi: Open palm?

Florence Herget: She would give them a whack, usually more than one on their hand. She didn’t have any trouble but I remember one teacher, she said to one boy hold your hand out. I think it was a ruler that she had. When she went to hit he grabbed the ruler and flung it across the room. Then they just started chasing each other across the room. That was quite something. Discipline was different then than it is now. When I was fourteen we went to Raymond and my grandma and grandpa sent money for us to come down and visit for the year. My sister and I went with my mother and we went to school down in the states near Augden. I could see such a change in the discipline. There was no strict discipline like that at all. The kids would go and talk to the teachers and would joke with them and laugh with them and some of the girls flirted with them. When the report cards came out the next morning I went to school and there was just a little bee hive around the teachers desk. I wondered what was going on and later when the broke it up and came back I asked. They were having their marks changed. I couldn’t believe it.  I can see that up here we follow behind the states by a few steps, now I can see that our discipline was just a little worse than that. When I was in school they didn’t have any graduations, it must have been a year or two after I was out before they started doing that. At that time all you had to do was go one year to normal. The school sports programs. All they had in those days was basketball that I remember. Some of the girls were cheerleaders.

Mark Durtschi: Are you talking about Raymond here?

Florence Herget: Ya, some of them were cheerleaders but I don’t remember of anything other than basketball. They don’t travel around like the do now. It was different. I went to school through twelve. The average seemed to go about that. I doubt that there were half of them that went on to anything else.

Mark Durtschi: Do you mean to tell me that the boys in Raymond generally went to a little more school than the boys in Stirling?

Florence Herget: No, I don’t know about Stirling.

Mark Durtschi: In Stirling a lot of the boys didn’t seem to go past eighth grade.

Florence Herget: There were a lot of those in Raymond to that didn’t. The ones that did go through grade twelve I don’t think there were to many of them, maybe not half of them that went on to anything else. If they made it that far then most of them would drop off.

Mark Durtschi: So it was predominating all over Sothern Alberta, not just Stirling.

Florence Herget: I think so.

Moroni Herget: school was out for a week or so that kids could go and help their dads pick potatoes in the fall and the same in the beets.

Florence Herget: Transportation, the railway was the big transportation; coal came in on the railway. Orders for meat, we had the catalogues, you picked out and ordered what you wanted there. Furniture, some implement stuff for farming. You could get almost anything out of the catalogue. They had a station agent and that played a big part, this fellow down here, he had ferns. His room that station agent room was just full of ferns, they were hanging. They were gorgeous. In the spring the roads buckled, they were just big mud holes. It seemed like they would push up, they would heave up and that was soft. If you got into that and you were stuck. The summer they settled down unless it rained. The winter, I guess as long as the roads were open from snow. When there was lots of snow they were bad that way to. I guess they weren’t too bad in the winter. It was spring when they bucked and heaved that was the worst. It brought Alkaline up. In Raymond, all down Main Street had a big ditch running on the one side. They irrigated with it, their lawns, their gardens, everything. That runs all summer long steady. That was why the roads heaved so in the spring. Then alkaline came up so bad that it was just white, it got so bad that they couldn’t raise gardens. After the water came in and the sewer and drainage they took those ditches out then they roads settled down and there was no problem at all. Before we had cars people walked, horses were the main way of getting around. When they first started getting more cars we lived down east of Taber and on the road called sunshine trail. That was the main road between Medicine Hat and Lethbridge we saw a lot of traffic. It wasn’t gravel roads, it was just dirt roads. We had a pond on our side of the road and the neighbours had a pond on their side of the road and in the spring people were stuck. I remember dad going out, getting the horses and pulling out cars out one after another. My dad loved horses, he had one horse to ride and then he had a stallion and he got to ride him all over. He thought the world of his horses. The first car that we had, my dad had a car when I was real small; it had no top, a Model T Ford. The next one he had a cover over the top of it. They were quite the cars. The summers those years seemed to be hotter and the summers seemed colder and more snow than they are now. When my dad lost his farm just east of Taber for a year and a half we moved down to a house in Purple Springs that my uncle owned. For two months that we didn’t go to school. It was cold and we had two miles to walk. We had the Christmas party and then they just closed the school up for two months. That was in 1935. Religion, we always belonged to the LDS church. My parents and grandparents all belonged for years. We lived five miles from town.
 
Tape 1 Side 2
 
Florence Herget: When we first went to Raymond they had divided the wards a few years before so they had the first ward and the second ward. We were in the first ward and had no building. So our meetings were held in the schoolhouse. We had that for several years, three or four years I believe after I was in Raymond. They asked me to when I was about fifteen or sixteen they asked me to work on the primary stake board. I think my aunt got me into that. The ladies were so nice, I felt so inadequate, I felt miserable. Then I worked in the primary, secretary through the summer. Then in Stirling I didn’t work too much in church, the kids were small. After the kids were a little older I taught primary, must have been thirteen years. I was a councillor for a couple years. I taught the boys for several years. I was a visiting teacher for many years and was secretary of the relief society for one session, about three years. We have always lived mostly in a Mormon community but I have a lot of respect for the other people that don’t belong to the church. When we were in Taber we had neighbours who didn’t belong to the church. They were just as good of people as you would ever find anywhere. When we lived out there on the farm they didn’t have home teachers and they didn’t have relief society teachers like they have now. Once and a while we would get a home teacher at that time, I guess once and a while a relief society teacher but it wasn’t on a regular basis. Our entertainments and social life in Stirling, we didn’t go and socialize much, the kids were small and we didn’t go out to much. Some people I have heard different ones say that they would walk clear across town to play cards with someone. They don’t visit like that anymore. It is sort of too bad; I think that TV has a lot to do with that. I remember my mom and dad people would visit in the evening or in the morning or anytime. They would stay for an hour or three. It seems like they had lots of time to visit those days. Stage productions in Stirling, I don’t know, Dorthy Hirschie used to work with the plays a lot. They were good, Elodia Christenson used to conduct a lot of plays too. We missed those. The dances, they used to have budget dances and they would have quite a few of them through the year.

Mark Durtschi: When you say budget dances you mean that that the church put on to raise money.

Florence Herget: Partly, you bought a ticket. That money I guess was used to pay an orchestra, for the upkeep, it was standard then. I believe that would let them go to other wards too on that. There used to be a movie that came to town. They had those every so often. Sheldon and Darlene started on accordion, they took lessons for years. They played accordion, they played together a lot, and they played for a lot of things that went on in town. They started playing in church for sacrament and anything entertainments of any kind. Then there came a law from the church that they weren’t supposed to play those kids of instruments in church. So they just quit asking them. They played in festivals. Darlene has won a lot of firsts and seconds. They had a band and that would travel around to different places. They loved it. Wayne and Dale, we tried to start them on accordion. They started but they didn’t like it enough to keep up with it. I think they both had a little piano, eventually they dropped it, and they weren’t that interested in music. Christmas was different when we were kids. There were no Christmas trees in our home, no decorations and not too many presents. Times were poor during the depression. It wasn’t like Christmas is now, we got maybe one or two little presents a little hard candy maybe an orange or two, we always had a Christmas program at school and a Santa that came around and handed out oranges and candy. We thought it was great. The celebrations in Stirling, Independence Day, I guess that was a big celebration. I guess their rodeos, their stampedes, their parades, the same for pioneer day. I don’t think that there was too much celebrating for thanksgiving. Not too much for Easter, maybe a little in church. Military, I wasn’t here when the first boys went so I didn’t know them; there were lots that went and lots that didn’t come back. In the first war that flu hit toward the end of the war. That took quite a few lives. The Second World War that was the one where I was here, I did affect us but nothing like the old countries. We were rationed, that was the main thing. You were rationed on sugar. You got coupons and you could only get a certain amount of sugar. Candy was hard to get. Gas, you had coupons for, that was rationed. There was none of my family; there were just the two girls so there was none of my family in the war. A few cousins went and some of my uncles but they would have been in the First World War. None of them had to go. My dad had a call but he had a serious operation not to long before so he I guess had a physical but he didn’t pass it. At that time he went on his mission. There was one instant that was kind of conical. In the First World War there was a fellow from Raymond that went to the service and a fellow from Germany, they met, they set the trenches over there. The war ended and this fellow came and immigrated to Raymond and they both worked at the sugar factory. I guess they had a falling out and this fellow who was from Raymond in the first place said I wish I had killed you when I had a chance. Serving in Public Offices I have never. The development in Stirling, a lot of changes since I came to Stirling, radios were out, they had radios. They didn’t have TV’s then the TV’s came, then computers and all of the other things that went with it, machinery, cars. I think this time in history shows more change than any other period of time. I think that is about it.

Mark Durtschi: Okay, I have a couple of questions for you. Quarantine back before the day was penicillin and modern drugs. People whenever they got an infectious disease they were Quarantined. Could you tell me a little bit about that?

Moroni Herget: Well if you got the measles, chicken pocks, an open cough they would put quarantine on you and nobody could go in and nobody could go out. Not just the one that had it but the whole family.

Mark Durtschi: Weren’t you telling b\me the other day that they were really strict about that.

Florence Herget: We had a neighbour that close to the house so that they could talk. They asked what mother wanted and they would go and get it. Otherwise as far as the town was concerned all they cared about was quarantine but not how they would live.

Florence Herget: While two of the kids were still in school and this lady that came with groceries she came and took them through school and kept them until school was out.

Mark Durtschi: Are you talking about here in Stirling?

Florence Herget: Yes

Mark Durtschi: Your children?

Florence Herget: No, his brother or sister.

Moroni Herget: It was a few weeks before school was out and if they had come in the house they would have missed the examination and a year of school. She kept them until school was out.

Mark Durtschi: Did they get it when they came home?

Florence Herget: Yes

Mark Durtschi: What did they get?

Florence Herget: Measles

Moroni Herget: How we got measles is my sisters worked down in Milk River and took care of their kids when the family had them. When they had them they just brought them home and dropped them off by the barn and then my sister came in the house and gave us all measles.

Mark Durtschi: I presume that every family was quarantined at one point in time.

Moroni Herget: My one sister had a fever and was quarantined for that. We all lived in the same house, she kept her in one room and kept a blanket over the door and kept formaldehyde on it. She came out and tended to us kids, the rest of us got the fever.

Mark Durtschi: Was quarantine effective or did everybody still get everything?

Moroni Herget: For me some of those diseases the got so that they couldn’t vaccinate for them.

Florence Herget: It must have been fairly effective because you see he had two sisters that were working old enough to be away from home working and the whole family hadn’t had it yet until that time so it must have worked.

Mark Durtschi: Could you tell us about the pest house?

Moroni Herget: Well it was just like a hospital and if you got a fever or anything you would go in there and they would take care of you.

Mark Durtschi: So it was a hospital for infectious diseases. Changing the subject again quickly, you were with your mom and your dad for fifteen years before you
moved into the farm because there was no place to buy.

Moroni Herget: There was one place that used to run a lumber yard on the side of his house. Because he offered to show us that, it was only about a fifty foot frontage, you couldn’t have any garage. You would have to come in from around the back so we didn’t care for that place to much. I kept it for a cow pasture.

Mark Durtschi: So Stirling wasn’t filled up.

Florence Herget: I think we tried living places and couldn’t get anywhere.

Moroni Herget: Well one had a ten acre that was good building; they weren’t any taxes on the land maybe twenty dollars on a ten acre.

Mark Durtschi: Could you tell of your perceptions of the Indians and just how their lives have changed during the time that you have been alive.

Florence Herget: Well the Indians, I have never thought that they could change as much as they did. When I was first married and we would go to Lethbridge these Indians would come to town and the men would have big braids almost down to their hips. They were dressed very poorly. The ladies would have an old blanket, and old raged blanket around their shoulders, some kind of an old skirt or dress on. Old moccasins for shoes, stalkings with holes, dirty and really not pulled up properly. They weren’t clean and now you can go to Lethbridge and they are just dressed just as respectable as anyone. They dress really nice, they go to the Laundromats, and you can find them there washing their clothes. It is such a change.

Moroni Herget: When we first got married in Lethbridge you could buy anything within four blocks. There were no big shopping malls. You could find anything that you wanted to buy.

Mark Durtschi: Let me bring you back to the Indians again. You were telling me some stories earlier about the Indians here when you were little. You could elaborate on that a little bit.

Moroni Herget: Well the summer came and they set up came just a little ways away from our place. They come with wagons and a bunch of dogs and some horses. They had bones and I guess they found a station and shipped them somewhere and made fertilizer out of them.

Mark Durtschi: As a kid they camped close to where you lived? Did you go over there when you were a kid?

Moroni Herget: Never went right over to them, they came to us.

Mark Durtschi: What kind of tents or tepees did they stay in?

Moroni Herget: They just had tepees with poles and skins all around them. In the winter they would go back into the west, the mountains where there was a lot of wood. In the summer they would come out on the prairie.

Mark Durtschi: How did the settlers treat the Indians back then?

Mark Durtschi:When I wasn’t born yet my uncle was only about three or five years old and the Indians had a tent right close to where the rail road was. They would leave this little boy, my uncle, with the Indians while they were out hauling beets.

Florence Herget: I guess they got along alright.

Moroni Herget: They couldn’t talk English but they played together, the kids did.

Mark Durtschi: Moroni told me here earlier that if you were very busy raising chickens, turkeys, selling hay, gardening, would you like to tell me a littler more about those times?

Florence Herget: Well in the spring we would go and order chickens. At first we had just chickens and would buy our turkeys. Those days they weren’t refrigerated or frozen and you would go to the butcher shop and a turkey would be hanging in the room and after they had hung there for a while, don’t know how many days, they got a little bit strong. After a while with that we got to think I wonder if we couldn’t raise turkeys along with the turkeys, we tried it. We raised a dozen turkeys with our chickens. We would butcher some and put for fryers and roasting. We would have the hens for eggs. The turkeys were fine, they were just fine until they got sold and then we would separate them. First we had the black turkeys and they were wild and hard to raise and handle.
 
Transcribed by Clinton Dovell