The Following story was written by George Russell ENLOW
With the little bit that I can remember I will try to recall some of my life before I was married. Born June 9, 1915 in Donora,Pa., which is south of Pittsburgh on the Monongahela River. At the age of one we moved to Belle Vernon, which is a little bit south of Donora. My Dad worked in Donora for an electrical contractor. I don't remember much of my schooling, while living in Belle Vernon. We lived next door to a wonderful colored family by the name of Smiths. Dad's health was not too good & the doctors advised him to move west. So at the last of May 1926, at the age of 10, Dad & Mom packed up their six kids& not much money in an old Oldsmobile Touring car. I don't remember the year of the car, but it had isinglass side curtains you could take out & four doors. A friend of Dad's, and his wife Lee & Minnie Tilmont went with us in their car & we headed west, destination the state of Washington. We camped out every night in a tent. I do remember all through the west so many jackrabbits killed along the roads.
In the evenings just about sunset, along the horizon, you could see hundreds of jackrabbits. I remember we stopped for the night just before we went into YellowstonePark & pitched our tent along a mountain stream. Sometime during the night it rained up in the mountains. We heard a tremendous noise, Mother and us kids was scared to death. The stream was running bank full. We had to move our tent to higher ground to keep from getting flooded. We entered Yellowstone Park the next day and there was plenty of parking space in 1926. We stayed there for a week, with the bears and other animals. I did a lot of fishing on what they called Fisherman's Bridge.
Mother was fit to be tied the whole trip taking care of us kids. We finally arrived in Seattle, Washington, travel time over a month. Minnie and Lee owned an old house outside of Seattle called Alderwood Manor. We had to cut waist high grass to find the house. The place was alive with an animal called the Mountain Beaver. It lived in holes like a woodchuck and cut small twigs and brush like a swamp beaver. I trapped many of them for fun. The 1906 Winchester.22 cal. rifle that Lee Tilmont is holding in the picture, I still have. We went to the Puget Sound in Seattle a few times and I remember catching a fish they called a dog-fish. Dad's health did not improve so the Doctors said we should move south.
I don't think we stayed in Seattle more than a month or two. Lee and Minnie Tilmont left us and returned to Ohio. Sister Martha, I think, took a train from Washington to San Antonio, TX. and we drove the old touring car. We stayed a day or two with some relatives in Los Angeles, CA then on to San Antonio, TX.
I don't know when we arrived in San Antonio. We rented an old house with dirt floors and millions of bed bugs. We had to keep the legs of our beds sitting in pans of water to keep them off of us.
My first encounter with a scorpion was at this house; got up one morning and put my hat on and it had a scorpion inside. We didn't stay long in that house. Dad and John worked in a milk plant. To earn some extra money John and I picked cotton, dragging a canvas bag about ten foot long and picking on our hands and knees. They would weigh the bag at the end of the row and pay us so much a pound. One time John came face to face with a diamond-backed rattler laying in the middle of the row and that ended our cotton-picking career!
We stayed in San Antonio about four years, long enough for me to become a Boy Scout. I don't know how many different schools I attended while there. Dad and John finally got a job at a large electric generating plant at Quanah, TX. We built a four-wheeled trailer that looked like a hay wagon with slotted sides to haul our furniture. We loaded up what we had and headed for Quanah, which is south-east of Amarillo. The electric plant was at Lake Paulineabout 15 miles outside of Quanah. On the way up to Quanah we were going along pretty good when Mother hollered to Dad "That looks like our trailer!" It had broken loose from the car, passed us on the left and crossed in front before landing in the ditch without too much damage done. The lake was owned by the power company for use in the plant. It was about the size of Conneaut Lake, PA, and around it were about twenty nice stucco houses for the employees.
The school I went to was on a large nearby cattle ranch. The bus driver was one of the cow hands and the teachers all wore cowboy boots and jeans. About all I had to do was go to school and fish and hunt. Dad gave me his 16 gauge double-barreled shotgun for Christmas, and I can still remember the first time I shot it. While shooting at a Jack-rabbit I pulled both barrels and got an awful surprise. Go to Next Page