Hudspeth County Herald and Dell Valley Review (Dell City, Tex.), Vol. 57, No. 2, Ed. 1 Friday, November 23, 2012 Page: 4 of 12
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PAGE 4 HUDSPETH COUNTY HERALD - DELL VALLEY REVIEW NOVEMBER 23, 2012
CROW FLAT
Doro
iky Lewis
November 19, 2012 - It feels like Thanksgiving is coming early this year.
Thanksgiving on the 22nd of November leaves us with another whole
week in the month. The holiday seemed to sneak up on us, and Christmas
is just around the comer.
There were reports of some good showers in the area this
weekend. The rain settled the dust and cleared the air. The daytime tem-
peratures have been very pleasant, and there have reports of snakes still
moving around, so keep an eye out.
Crow Flat folks are looking forward to spending the holiday with
their family. This is that special time of year when we take the time to
show our appreciation to those that are dear to us. I am blessed in having
many wonderful friends, and I thank God for each one. I wish everyone a
happy and safe Thanksgiving holiday.
Monday, November 19th was Pop Snow’s birthday. We wish this
good friend and neighbor a very Happy Birthday! Wednesday, November
21st, was Jane Schafer’s birthday. She is 79 years old. We wish this spe-
cial lady a very Happy Birthday! We are thankful for these special friends
and neighbors!
The Jones Ranch will wrap their fall cattle work up by Thanks-
giving, and Bobby and Pat Jones and Elizabeth Jones are looking forward
to having all of their family together for the holiday.
Friday, Nora Lea Lewis and Janet Myers went to Carlsbad. They
were able to see Nora Lea’s brother, Pat Lewis, in the Carlsbad Medi-
cal Center. He had been in the hospital for two weeks and was finally
released Friday afternoon. He is now living with his son Aaron Lewis and
wife Prissy. Aaron and Prissy have a ranch between Carlsbad and Artesia.
Pat will be missed in Dell City, and our thoughts and prayers are with
him.
News from Carlsbad Caverns National Park
Carlsbad Caverns Auditions Singers
for “Rock of Ages” Cavern Tour
Carlsbad Caverns National Park is in-
viting singers from the local area to audition for
the annual “Rock of Ages” historic cavern tour, to be held in December.
Beginning in 1929, the park regularly held Rock of Ages cav-
ern tours. After traveling around the caverns’ Big Room and enjoying its
spectacular formations, the group in the ranger-led tour would stop at a
monolith of stone named Rock of Ages. The rangers would then turn out
all the lights, and the group would sing the hymn, for which the formation
was named. For about a decade, the tours were an extremely popular tradi-
tion, in which thousands of visitors participated.
The Rock of Ages tour was discontinued in 1944, much to the
sorrow of visitors far and wide. The park understood the historic signifi-
cance of the Rock of Ages tour, and resurrected it as an annual special
event, which continues today. For several years, the beautiful voice of Park
Ranger Paula Bauer would pierce the darkness in song, encouraging others
to sing the Rock of Ages hymn. Ranger Bauer moved on to a new National
Park Service assignment this summer, leaving a huge void in this special
event.
Auditions will be held in the cavern on Saturday, Dec. 1 at 6 p.m.
The audition is open to solo performers as well as small ensembles. Please
come prepared to sing the first two verses of Rock of Ages, a cappella.
Three singers/groups will be chosen from the auditions, and each
will perform the song at one of the three scheduled Carlsbad Caverns Na-
tional Park 2012 annual Rock of Ages historic cavern tours on Dec. 14,15
and 16.
For more information and to sign up for the auditions, please call
Pam Cox, park ranger, at (575) 785-3131.
A Gallimaufry of Memories
Filosofy and Phoolishness by Sag-Ashus
It is Ole Sag’s fond hope that our loyal readers get a kick out of our penchant for teasing
them with unusual words from time to time - a habit reflected in the title of this column. If you
elect to peruse the rest of these stories the meaning of that word should become evident, as the
stories are in fact a hodge-podge of unrelated memories, with no relation to each other and in no
particular order.
One such page in our memory bank is of our grandfather, the patriarch of the clan. He
had a proclivity for prefacing an order by saying, “While you boys are resting, I want you to go
move a fence row, or - clean out a ditch, or - gather a bunch of cows,” or - whatever mission he
had in mind for us on that particular day. We never did figure out when the “resting” was sup-
posed to take place, but we always knew when we heard “While you’re resting” that a job was
forthcoming.
One wonderful Christmas morning we discovered that old Santa had left us a set of
molds designed to make toy soldiers and airplanes out of molten lead. Well sir, we were of
course anxious to try out these new “toys,” but we had no lead to work with, so, being the re-
sourceful country boy that you have read about, we started searching around the shop and, lo and
behold, we found some old discarded 6-volt car batteries.
Folks in today’s society may find it hard to believe, but we cut open those old batter-
ies and removed the insulating sheets, which in those days were made of wood. We then lit a
fire in the coal-fired forge in the shop and melted down the lead plates in a cast-iron ladle that
came with the mold. After skimming off the slag of impurities which floated on top, we poured
the lead into the molds, which we had previously “smoked” on the inside by burning kitchen
matches under them. This was to prevent the molten lead from sticking to the mold.
After the whole kit-and-caboodle cooled down, we opened up the molds to find bright
and shiny new lead soldiers and airplanes, which we then painted bright colors with paint that
undoubtedly contained lead, and we are happy to report that, so far as we can tell, and by the
way we are 85 years old, we have never experienced any ill effects from lead poisoning or from
the sulfuric acid that we were messing around with.
Our many farmers in this area may find this amusing. We used to raise a short staple
Acala Cotton, which, when planted on very fertile land, could grow to a height of 6 feet or more
and was all harvested by hand picking. The cotton planted nowadays is a variety that does not
grow tall, so as to accommodate the giant picking machines that have replaced the pickers drag-
ging long canvas sacks behind them that used to swarm through the fields every harvest season.
On one particular occasion Ole Sag was attending to the “weighing-in” - where the
pickers would bring their sacks full of cotton to the trailer to be hung on a scale and weighed
and to receive tickets for the amount picked and then scale a ladder to empty the sack into the
trailer. One of our duties was to be on the lookout for pickers who sometimes tried to increase
the weight of their sacks by hiding rocks or dirt clods or any other heavy object to be found in
the field in the sacks before bringing it to be weighed.
Now comes the interesting part. A teenage boy was struggling to hang his sack on the
scale, and as we were weighing it the sack “sneezed.” Upon investigation we discovered that this
enterprising young man had secreted his little brother in the sack with instructions to be still and
remain silent, which he did, until the cotton tickled his nose and he let go with the sneeze that
proved to be the brothers’ undoing.
In the 1950s and 60s we had what was called the Bracero Program, which allowed
farmers to bring guest workers from Mexico, especially at peak labor periods such as harvesting-
in this area these workers were processed through a federally operated facility in the Lower Val-
ley below El Paso known as Rio Vista. The episode we are about to share with you involves one
of these guest workers who had just arrived from the interior of Mexico and spoke a dialect that
we found a bit disconcerting. On his first day of work we were preparing to irrigate some half-
grown cotton, which was located on both sides of a concrete lined ditch that was a quarter-mik
long and dead level from end to end. This was accomplished by using 2-inch siphon tubes, which
were easy to activate once you got the hang of it. We asked this individual if he was familiar with
using siphon tubes, and after repeated assurances that he was we started the pump and foolishly
left him alone to attend to other matters, and when we returned a while later to check on the situ
ation we found him on his knees frantically sucking on the end of a tube and the ditch spilling
over from end to end.
Tuck this one into your notebook of guides for living: “Only the active have the true
relish of life. ”
Sag
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Stuart, Andrew. Hudspeth County Herald and Dell Valley Review (Dell City, Tex.), Vol. 57, No. 2, Ed. 1 Friday, November 23, 2012, newspaper, November 23, 2012; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1200203/m1/4/: accessed July 5, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .