My father-in-law joined us for a supper of macaroni and hamburger hotdish last evening. He will soon be ninety-two years old, and like my parents he holds a huge library of memories inside his head. It is interesting to get them talking about their "old days," and I always try to preserve some of their stories on paper. How about this one we heard last night, for instance? No names will be mentioned here, but on a bull buying trip to Mandan, one of Adam's companions got drunk and rode all the way back home, 75 miles or so, in the trailer with the bulls because he wanted to get sobered up. Adam worried about him and checked on him several times, but apparently he rode back there all the way home.
These stories are all 60 to 70 years old. Here are a few more.
* A neighbor's house burned down because the man's kitchen matches were in the pockets of a pair of overalls that was hanging in an open porch. The wind kept slamming them back and forth and ignited the matches.
* A cow belonging to an acquaintance of his living in Mandan somehow got trapped in the city's ground level water tank and died there, a fact nobody knew about for some time as they drank the water.
* Adam rode the train a few times when he shipped his cattle by rail to Sioux City. His wife, my mother-in-law, always packed a big lunch which his companions always poked fun at until, of course, they got hungry and helped themselves to it. When they got to Sioux City, he said, you could buy a big steak dinner at the stockyards cafe for seventy-five cents. Then, cattle only brought about $50 per head.
* He made whisky a few times using as ingredients corn, potatoes, wheat, and chunks of sugar. He'd run it through the still two or three times, then test its purity by burning it in a spoon. If it all disappeared in the flames it was good.
* A hired man who Adam often hired at harvest time liked to drink, got drunk this one time, slept in the garage, and in the morning the new litter of kittens were crawling all over him. He tried leaving the garage later on and somehow got his head caught between the garage's sliding doors. There he hung, and Adam said he thought he was dead, but everything turned out all right.
* There are many more tales to tell and so many of them are tragically sad like the one where a relative in Russia drove a wagon load of prisoners to be executed and found out later on his father was in the wagon. They will be told at another time, however.
