(Fannie's recollection, continued) We left on the train and we stopped in Sanborn and rented a house. But there was no work there. My mother was living there. After Dad died, she got married to Blimers. So we went there and rented a place from Lemkuil in the country in Hospers, Iowa. Pa worked for farmers around there. Frank was born there in January on a terrible cold night. The doctor got stuck on the road, so Pa had to shovel him out in the night. The folks were selling milk in Hospers, so we went to church there. They were always after us to send the kids to Christian school. We told the board that we didn't have any money to buy a horse or a little cab. So one day they came with an old horse and the cab. Pa says, "I can't buy oats either. I've got just enough to feed my family." They got us one sack of oats, but it was mostly junk, after which we had to buy feed. So they went to town school, but the old horse got worse. They would come home; one would pull the horse, others would push. One morning they found the horse dead, and that was the end of that. Country school was a mile and a half away. One winter it was so cold they had to walk, so Pa took them half way and told them to run to school. I wanted Harry to stay home since he was the younger of the boys, but when they came to school, his one hand and fingers were froze. The lady teacher put him near the stove, but that was the wrong thing to do: his fingers are crooked on that hand from the frost. The WPA came out, and men could work. The government paid them $15 a week, but sometimes they would have to drive quite a ways. Pa did that for a while, but he didn't like it: they had too many men on one small job. They would stand in each other's way.
Ben Teunissen and Lizzie were living in Sanborn, but ran out of work and made up their mind to go to California. So Pa says, "If Ben can get work there, then I can, too. Let's sell what we got and go, too." So we had a sale of our stuff, bought a second-hand car for $35, put all our belongings on top of the car, some things on the fender, and said goodbye to my folks. The kids wanted to go home at night, but I said, "We haven't got a home any more." I cried a little. We went to John's folks and stayed a night. Next day we left on the last day of the year, 1935. Folks were plenty worried, all that stuff on the top of the car, 7 children, and 2 adults. Theresa was sitting between us, Frank on my lap, the rest in the back seat. The first night we stopped in Oklahoma and had a cottage all by ourselves. We had canned meat and potatoes with us. One evening we ate in a restaurant. Second day on the road, Pa says, "The car wouldn't go no matter what [gear] I put it in." It would not take up speed. It was New Year's Day, but we found a garage open somewhere. He jacked the car up, and pulled the wheel, and everything came with it. We had to use a torch to get the axle from the wheel. The guy got it fixed, and we could go, but Pa said, "You better look at the other side to see if that is all right." He said that one might be all right, so we went, but the same thing again. We came to a little town, but no garage open. So we went back to the same garage, and he was just closing up. But he fixed that wheel in the same way. So 4 o'clock in the afternoon, we took off. It was kind of rainy, and my paper boxes on top of the car and on the sides got wet. So at night, I sat up and dried everything that got wet. I wrote Lizzie a letter and told her I don't know when we will see you at the rate we're going now. The trip took us a week. In the mountains we would lose our water. It got so hot the cap of the radiator would blow off, and all our water would go out. So every time we would pass a station, we would fill our gallon cans. We passed one truck with a family in it. Theirs got too hot climbing, so they just put something behind the wheels, so it would not slip down. Some other people left Sanborn the same day, and they got stuck in New Mexico as they ran out of money. We only had $200 with us when we started. We had to buy a new tire, but things were cheaper then. After we got out of the mountains, we went right along. Sure glad we were almost there. We stayed by Ben and Lizzie till we found a house and got settled in Los Alamitos, and that wasn't too long. Ben was working at a cat and dog food factory. Pa got a job there, and a house went with it. So we had a lot to be thankful for on the way to California. We had a wall clock which I had gotten from the grandparents with us. In the middle of the night, it started to strike, and it just kept it up. So in the middle of the night, Pa got it out of the box and stopped it from ringing. I don't see how we ever did that trip. But the Lord was with us.
We were happy. A job and home with hardly any furniture, a table and chairs, a stove, and 3 beds. Our Bill got sick, he had yellow jaundice. Had to eat sweets, so we got him candy. Uncle Ben's daughter had it, too. She must have been around 8 years old, but the Lord took her home. But our Bill got over it. We had a doctor from Bellflower, which was quite a few miles from Los Alamitos. When he said that Bill was better, I asked how much I owed him. He looked around and said, "I don't want anything. Just buy something that you need. Well, we gave him some money and thanked him a lot. He went to the Christian Reformed Church, too, and was of Dutch descent. In the meantime, a couple, Charlie and Ann De Jong, that we knew from Chicago, wrote that they would like to come by us and look for work. They were by us 2 weeks and got a milking job; later, they had their own dairy. But Pa never liked factory work, and there was a big dairy close by, so he started to milk there, 30 cows, twice a day, by hand. By the 2nd day, his hands hurt him so, so he said, "You better help me." He started at one in the morning, so I went with him, but I didn't get any sleep, and the kids had to go to school. By my 2nd day, my hands and fingers hurt, too. On the 3rd day, I couldn't milk any more, but Pa kept it up yet. But at last he told the boss, "I can't do it any more." Any new milker that he hired got the hardest cows. Their bags were so hard that you had to squeeze real hard to get the milk out. Lots of milkers got infection; their nails would rot off. So we moved to Artesia, about a half mile from town. Pa got another milking job and liked it. After the milking, the men would have to do chores. Some would clean barns, and others would do the milk house, and some would feed. But one morning after milking, the men went home to sleep. The boss had to fix fence as the cows broke out. So when Pa came back after dinner to start milking again, he said to Pa, "You should have stayed to help me." Pa told him, "I milked my string, and I did my chores. That was my job. I didn't have to stay to fix fence. If you would have asked me if I would help, I would have done so. So you can look for another milker." So that afternoon he was out of a job. But then he started to haul green feed for somebody, alfalfa for the cows. The boys, Bill and Pete, would go with him once in a while. The dairyman came and said to Pa, "I got machines now, so you can come back again." Some milkers wouldn't milk the cows, so the dairyman slowly lost all his cows. But Pa hauled green feed for somebody else, and Bill and Pete got jobs milking, too, but they had to go to school till 16.
Then one day the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. There were a lot of Japanese people around Los Angeles, and some were working in fields close to the ocean. So they made all those Japanese leave, and they put them in a camp. One night they came around [so that] every window had to be made so no light would shine through. That night they saw planes, and they were shooting at that time, but they were so high they couldn't reach. We stood outside watching, but it was dangerous: shrapnel came down from the shooting. We could see them very high.
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