G.. The Mulkey Place

Bob Zybach: Wow.

Neil Vanderburg: That's about as many as I can remember just off the top of my head! They were getting down young enough then that I couldn't remember them.

Bob Zybach: They must have been having a hard time finding names, too.

Neil Vanderburg: Well, it was kind of interesting, I was talking to my sister telling her about this tape that was gonna be made, and she says "Be sure and tell about when I went over to the house when they were eating breakfast," that was when they lived in the Smith house over across the street from us, and their little girl about three years old was eating breakfast and the fried egg was a little rubbery and it slid off her plate and so she climbed down off her chair and chased the chickens off the egg and picked it up and put it back on her plate and ate it! My sister, when she came home, wasn't hungry.

G. The Mulkey Place

Neil Vanderburg: some cherry thicket in here, still they had a nice cherry tree in here.

Bob Zybach: Okay, you can remember the cherry tree?

Neil Vanderburg: Oh, yeah.

Bob Zybach: It's still here, we marked it as a landmark. Can you remember anything about it in particular?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, I picked cherries off of it one year. It sat right by the house, I don't know where the cherry tree is but it sat probably 25 feet towards the road and south of the house.

Bob Zybach: It was a big tree back then?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, it was a good sized tree back then.

Bob Zybach: Can you remember any other trees, an old orchard or anything through this area?

Neil Vanderburg: I think there's some pears and apples in there, but I'm not real sure. Do you have the tape on now?

Bob Zybach: Yep.

Neil Vanderburg: Well, I want to point out. . . this isn't much of a hill here. But when we moved here, it went down into the bottom of that draw and then went clear up to the top and that was one steep hill.

Bob Zybach: This hilt up ahead here?

Neil Vanderburg: That hill right there was one steep hill to get over.

Bob Zybach: Did you have a name for it?

Neil Vanderburg: No, we didn't. It was always just the Mulkey-Vanderburg Hill, was what we called it. But you can see, if you look down where the field is down there, and dig the dirt out there where that field is down there, and then put the dirt up on the top, how steep that hill was. It was steep.

Bob Zybach: So, the Ennis' s lived here when you first moved in?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, and then the Mulkeys moved in. Men Mulkey.

Bob Zybach: And then their son moved in next door.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Do you know who lived there before he lived there?

Neil Vanderburg: No, I don't.

Bob Zybach: Okay, and then Men Mulkey moved into this house afterwards. So, can you remember anybody talking about where Brinkley lived?

Neil Vanderburg: No, I don't recognize Brinkley at all.

Bob Zybach: Okay. But you can remember this hill here. Trying to get up this hill.

Neil Vanderburg: You bet. This is the way we moved in. And we were loaded.

Bob Zybach: Oh, so, even this hill, the first trip across it you can remember.

Neil Vanderburg: You bet. Because we had a 1923 Dodge with a four-cylinder engine in it and three- speed transmission and we didn't know whether we were going to get up it or not!

Bob Zybach: Okay. Can you remember anything else about this place here, or the house that used to be here, anything in particular about the Mulkeys?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, the house, I believe, was a two-story house, I don't think there was any basement in it. My sisters used to clean house for Mrs. Mulkey and the youngest boy, Guyland, was born here, and when my sisters would come to clean the house, that was Shirley and Wilma, they would have to change Guyland's pants and they didn't think he'd been changed for a week. They said she wasn't a very good housekeeper and she wasn't a very good mother. She was a school teacher.

Bob Zybach: Oh, Mrs. Mulkey was a school teacher?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. And, she didn't care much about doing anything else.

Bob Zybach: Now, all these Christmas trees out here. Who's land was this?

Neil Vanderburg: That was Mulkeys. This was the farm.

Bob Zybach: So what would be out there when you were a kid? What kind of crops?

Neil Vanderburg: Oats, wheat sometimes, oats and vetch, hay, they had a barn on this side.

Bob Zybach: That's on the east side.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, on the east side of the road they had a barn and they milked probably 20 head of cattle in here. And we used to trade bulls with them for breeding our cows and so forth. But it was more of a dairy than it was a farm. They had an old McCormick Deering, 110 McCormick Deering with lugs on it that they farmed with. And between the boys and the old man, well they kept that thing going 24 hours a day, so in farming time, well they, we could hear that old tractor running night and day. And there is one thing I can also tell you, when Men got through thrashing he stepped off the tractor after he got through, we bound then, and thrashed with a thrashing machine. But when we got through, got Out of the field he'd strike a match on the seat of his pants and set the field on fire and it'd go "WHOOSH" and didn't hardly make any smoke at all because anytime you leave straw lay on the ground even over night it's drawing moisture from the ground. I believe there was as much burning then as there is now, but not near as much smoke. Because they burned their wheat straw, they burned all their straw, whereas now they just burn grass straw. But it went up so fast it went clear up into the atmosphere, and it was dry. And I don't know if you ever sat on a tile and got your pants wet sitting on a tile, well that's just the same thing you're doing letting your grass lay on the ground. As far as I'm concerned.

Bob Zybach: Just drawing the moisture out.

Neil Vanderburg: You're drawing the moisture right up out of the ground. And so that's my thoughts on this field burning, is the DEQ is making it worse instead of better as far as telling people when they can burn. Because I know that when the combine pulls out of the field that's the driest that straw's ever gonna get. And I saw one year, it was like this year only worse, and they let people burn after the straw was so wet that it would take three days for a field to burn. You never saw so much smoke in this valley. So, anyway I'm an old timer but that's my observations.