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Oral History Interview with Alberta (Fortune) Nicolds

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TITLE	Oral History Interview with Alberta (Fortune) Nicolds
INTERVIEWEE	Nicolds, Alberta (Fortune)
SUBJECT	Family History; Education; Pioneer History--New Mexico; Homemaking--1940s, Homemaking--1950s
Browse Topic	Agriculture Education Family and community
DESCRIPTION	Alberta (Fortune) Nicolds talks about what life was like growing up in Luna, New Mexico, in the 1940s and 1950s.
INTERVIEWER	Luger, Jay and Jones, Lenore
TYPE	Sound Text
Material Collection	Oral Histories of Luna, New Mexico
RIGHTS MANAGEMENT	Property of Alpine Public Library. For reproduction permissions, contact us at 928-339-4925.
DATE ORIGINAL	2011-03-17
Time Period	1910s (1910-1919) 1940s (1940-1949)
ORIGINAL FORMAT	Oral histories recorded on digital media with transcriptions.
DIGITAL IDENTIFIER	index.cpd
Date Digital	2010-2011
DIGITAL FORMAT	MP3 (MPEG Audio Layer 3) DOC (Microsoft Word)
File Size	747 Bytes
DIGITIZATION SPECIFICATIONS	Oral histories were recorded on an Olympus WS-6005 Digital Voice Recorder.
REPOSITORY	Alpine Public Library. PO Box 528, Alpine, AZ 85920. www.co.apache.AZ.us
Full Text	Alberta (Fortune) Nicolds Luna, NM Interview: March 17, 2011 I was born in Springerville, Arizona in a motel, on October 2, 1941. There was no hospital. The doctor had a permanent delivery room set up in the motel. Nearly everybody that was born in the year 1941 was born in that motel. I know other people here in Luna who were also born there. My parents were Charlie Louis Fortune. He was born in Kentucky in 1912. He migrated to this country during hard times in the ‘30s. My mother was Olive Gallagher. She was born in Ramah, New Mexico in 1917. Her father got diphtheria I believe, and died before she was born. Mother came down to this area in Nutrioso and lived with an older sister. She ended up living permanently in Luna. My father was a logger and drove a logging truck. Back in those days there were dozens of sawmills. He hauled logs from the woods to the sawmill. I remember him telling me he hauled railroad ties to the mines in Morenci. The roads were all dirt or gravel at the time and the road through Mule Creek, NM to Morenci was so bad that they wouldn’t take a truck load of timber down that way. They actually went around through Globe and went through Salt River Canyon, which also was a bad road but not as bad as Mule Creek. I thought it was real interesting because recently my daughter and her husband hauled railroad ties from Morenci up to their house in Alpine, for their yard. So I thought maybe she hauled some of the same railroad ties that her grandpa hauled when I was a small child. My mother basically was a homemaker. She did some sewing for money. She was six feet tall. Back in the early 1900s if you were six feet tall you couldn’t buy clothes that fit you. So when she was very young she learned to make all of her clothes. She was an excellent seamstress. Everything we owned was home sewn. In fact my sister and I always had the nicest clothes in town because my mother sewed them. It was cheap, so we had nice clothes and a lot of them. I was just telling someone the other day, there was only one store here in town. That was Laney Mercantile. They carried a little bit of everything, including some dry goods. I remember in July, we would go look at the fabric because they carried 4- yard pieces of fabric, and even some bolts of fabric. We’d have a hard time deciding what we wanted our school dresses made out of. Then we also ordered material from Montgomery Ward or Sears Roebuck , or another catalog, Aldens. It would often be on sale for four yards for a dollar. For less than a dollar you could have a nice dress. Of course a dollar was a lot of money then. I went to grade school here in Luna a good part of my life. At least until my father went to work for the government. There were two rooms here in our school in Luna. We called them the little room and the big room, but they were both the same size. The reason they were called little room and big room was because the younger classes, first through fourth grade went to one room, and the big kids went to the other. We only had two teachers at the time. I would say, generally, there were around six or seven kids in each class. So we ended up with twenty-five or so kids in a class room. The teachers were very good to organize their time so everybody was busy while some were having one on one teaching with her. We had good teachers for the most part. We had one wacky one. I went to high school in Reserve until my senior year and then we moved to Alamagordo, where I graduated. I was very unhappy about that. My class in Reserve had 20 to 25 kids in it and my class in Alamagordo had 300. It was a big adjustment as far as that went. We had a great high school too, with a lot of involvement. We had band and chorus, home economics, and of course all of the basics. I remember when I was a freshman in high school, my mother bumped into my algebra teacher in downtown Reserve. She said, “How is Alberta doing in algebra?” He said, “Well, not so good in algebra, but she is doing real well in boys.” Boys and music. I have one sister a year older than me. I kind of grew up thinking I was very dumb because she was exceptionally smart and I was just kind of an average kid. Except that I did have a few things going for me. I always did love music. I can remember when I was a child going to church. I always watched the woman who was playing the piano. We didn’t have an organ in our building, but I always watched the woman playing piano. I would go home where we had a chair in the living room that had an arm with a hole in it, where you could stick your legs through. I’d pretend that the arm of the chair was the piano. I played and sang and drove my family nuts. When I was in fourth grade we had a teacher come to Luna who taught piano. That one year she taught piano. We didn’t have a piano but there was a family in town who did, and I was best friends with their daughter. They allowed me to practice piano there. So I learned it and loved it, and pursued it on my own after that. I really enjoyed it as a talent all through my life. I played for all kinds of things from concerts, to funerals, to church, to children’s organizations, and school activities. It was great growing up in Luna back then. Most of the people had very little money but we thought nothing of that. That was life. Our wants were very few beyond our basic needs. There were usually six or eight kids your age, or in your class at school, that you were friends with. We had plenty of friends. We had good activities both in church and in school. One of the things that they did in church when I was a child, was have a movie once a month. And of course we lived at least 45 miles from the nearest theatre and hardly ever went to Springerville for a movie. Although I do remember the first movie that I saw in Springerville. It was the first theatre that I ever went to. The movie was “Song of the South”. You can’t even buy that anymore. Once a month we had a movie in the chapel, which was the only big room in our building. They moved the pulpit and set up the screen and we had movies. They even served popcorn. They charged five cents to go to the movie. They only charged enough to pay for the rental of the reel. We saw a lot of good movies. Also, another thing we did for activity was dance. Everyone danced. We started out dancing almost when we could walk, because they would have dances once or twice a month. In the school building the little room and the big room were split by folding doors. So they could open it up and use it as a big recreation room. There were local people who played instruments and we had good music. We learned to dance. Even in church in the chapel, they would move all the pews back. They had dances for the young kids as well as teenagers. We also had picnics and such. Of course we could also just roam the hills, basically. We were safe. We never questioned our safety. The only big threat might have been a rattlesnake, if you ever run across one of those. Thank goodness I never did. We roamed this valley. My grandparents lived here in the main part of town, and we also lived pretty much near the main part of town. My grandparents had a parcel of land at the east end of the valley, which is close to two miles from here (Luna Community Center). We used to take the cows down to the pasture, just us young kids. It wasn’t much of a problem because the cows knew where they were going. You just followed them, opened the gate and put them in the pasture. Then in the evening you went back and got the cows. And the cows went straight home because they needed to be milked and wanted to be fed. We went barefooted a lot in the summer time. Gee, now I can’t do that for anything. We must have toughened up our feet because we went barefooted most of the summer. Of course we had responsibilities in our home life. We did all kinds of things. I loved doing outdoor chores and my sister loved doing indoor chores. Particularly in the summer time, I worked a lot in the yard and the garden, weeding. We had chickens and pigs to feed. We never did have a cow. My grandparents had cows and we got milk and butter from them. My grandparents were Vain and Clara Snyder. We had indoor and outdoor chores. We had to do dishes. We carried our water from a well. When I was very young there was no electricity in this valley. We had outdoor toilets. Outdoor toilets had to be scrubbed periodically. That is one job I hated doing. When it came to wash day you had to haul water from a well. My mother had a big area outside in the yard where she built a fire and she had a half- barrel there that she heated water in. Our first washing machine was an old gas wringer washing machine. We heated the water and filled the washer. We had three tubs for rinse. We started out washing the white clothes first. Then we ran them through the ringer into the rinse tubs. We went through three rinses before we hung them out. Then we washed the little darker clothes like shirts and socks. Then we ended up with the dark clothes and jeans. In the end we washed the rugs. I can remember once, getting my arm caught in the wringer. My mother had always told us to be very careful. But the wringers did spring open, which was fortunate. I was a little skinny kid at that time and I caught my hand in that wringer, and it was just taking my arm through. Then after it got so far it popped open and released the pressure. But I loved washing. That was one of my favorite chores. I absolutely loved washing. And then of course the next day was the day to iron. We had what we called a sprinkler bottle, a tall bottle with a narrow neck. It had a sprinkler head with a cork that fit in the neck of the bottle. We would sprinkle all of our clothes, then would roll them up and let them set for two or three hours. Then we did our ironing. I can remember when we were very young our mother taught us to iron. We started out ironing handkerchiefs and very simple things. I didn’t like ironing as much as I did washing. Like I said, my mother sewed. She made all of our clothes. So she started teaching us kids to sew. I guess the first thing we started sewing on was what we called the nine patch doll quilt. Of course it was very straight simple sewing. Both my sister and I were excited to be able to learn to sew on a treadle sewing machine. It was kind of tricky. We had to get the rhythm of the thing to make it work right. But that wasn’t so hard. I did sew my finger. I sewed right through my index finger through the nail, and immediately stopped the treadle. I sat there with the needle through my finger. My mother had to come and pull the needle up to get it loose. Then I wasn’t going to sew anymore. She said, “Yes you are.” We got it all bandaged up and she made me go back to sewing. And of course that is one of my loves to this day. I like to sew. I sewed a lot of kids’ clothes through the years. In fact one time I made extra money to meet the household expenses by making draperies. I had been trained to make them. After I graduated from high school I went to business college. Actually, I wanted to go to real college and I wanted to major in music. Then someone told me that if I majored in music I had to be really good in math because math courses were required. So I opted not to do that because I didn’t like math. I wish I had gone ahead and done that, but I did go to business school in Albuquerque. Then I worked for awhile in a mortgage loan office in Albuquerque. Then I met my husband. He was from Moriarty, NM. That’s where he grew up. In later years he moved to Albuquerque. Right after we married we came to Luna for the first time. My grandparents lived here at the time. My grandmother was very sick. She had cancer. We came and spent a few days visiting them and when we came, Richard said, “That is where I want to live.” The only problem with Luna was that there wasn’t much of a way to make a living. Of course, if you were into logging or ranching, or if you worked for the Forest Service then you had a way to make a living. But we weren’t into any of that. It was many years later that we finally moved to Luna. In 1992 we heard that the Luna Mercantile was for sale. So we looked into that and bought it. The people who owned it at the time had just let it go down to nothing. We really believed we could build up the business and make it work. But it didn’t work very well. We ended up selling it after we lost a lot of money. But that is what brought us back home. You asked about our school. Like I said, most of the time we had good teachers. Some of the time we had teachers that were a little weird. When I was in eighth grade we had a teacher named Mr. Slater. He was a very intelligent man, probably too smart for us kids. But he wanted us to gain an appreciation for poetry. He would stand in front of the room and recite poetry but he would do it with his eyes shut. There were seventh and eighth graders in that room. Of course we were not really interested in the poetry so we started throwing spit balls at him when he had his eyes shut. Occasionally we would hit him, and sometimes he didn’t even know it. So one day somebody hit him, and he stopped and opened his eyes, and I was laughing. I never seemed to be able to keep a straight face even when I was innocent. Like when my sister said I did something when she had done it, and mother would ask if I did, and I couldn’t keep a straight face. So that day I was laughing and he accused me of throwing the spit ball, which I hadn’t. So he said I had to stay after school. I was determined that I wasn’t going to stay after school because I hadn’t done it. He always stood at the front of the room and told us ‘good evening.’ Well there was a back door. And so as he was telling the other kids good evening, I went out the back door. That day it was pouring rain and I ran for all I was worth. Then I could see him headed for his car. But he was on the steps of the school jumping around trying to get his over-boots on. He was a very proper man, actually, a very distinguished man. So I knew he was going to get in his car and he was going to catch up to me. So when I got to the church, I ran into the outhouse out behind the church and hid until he went by. Then as soon as he went by, and he was headed for my house, I knew I was going to be in trouble. So then I went the back lanes home and hid in a neighbor’s pig pen until I saw him leave my house. Then I told my mother I didn’t do it and I was not going to stay after school because I didn’t do it. So anyway, my mother finally took me back to school and we got it all straightened out. I’ll tell you another little story. I shouldn’t tell this one because it is really bad. When we were in eighth grade we moved from the old two room school house into the new school house. I was president of the eighth grade and I had a gavel. I was supposed to be keeping order as the kids were helping move the library. My best friend got real bossy with me, so I got bossy back with her. Of course the teacher wasn’t anywhere around. So I had this little wooden gavel in my hand that I was supposed to be keeping order with. When she got nasty with me I whacked her on the head and knocked her out. So of course the kids ran to the other building and got the teacher. By then my friend was awake again. So then the two of us got expelled from school because of that. We were both pretty much at fault, but I was at fault for over-using my power, I guess.
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TITLE	Transcription of oral history interview with Alberta (Fortune) Nicolds
INTERVIEWEE	Nicolds, Alberta (Fortune)
TYPE	Text
Material Collection	Oral Histories of Luna, New Mexico
RIGHTS MANAGEMENT	Property of Alpine Public Library. For reproduction permissions, contact us at 928-339-4925.
ORIGINAL FORMAT	Oral histories recorded on digital media with transcriptions.
DIGITAL IDENTIFIER	Alberta (Fortune) Nicoldds.doc
Date Digital	2010-2011
DIGITAL FORMAT	DOC (Microsoft Word)
File Size	1825792 Bytes
DIGITIZATION SPECIFICATIONS	Oral histories were recorded on an Olympus WS-6005 Digital Voice Recorder.
REPOSITORY	Alpine Public Library. PO Box 528, Alpine, AZ 85920. www.co.apache.AZ.us

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