Oral History Interview with John L. Conovaloff

              Interview with John Conovaloff
	

The date today is June 28, 1991. On this tape I will be interviewing John Conovaloff.

JA:	John, when did your family come to Arizona?

JC:	Didn’t she tell you all of that?

JA:	No, uh-uh, we didn’t talk about your family, no.

JC:	In [19]17.

JA:	1917.  And where did you settle?  Where did your father settle his farm?

JC:	It’s about 85th and Thomas.

JA:	85th and Thomas, over by the Tolleson area there then?

JC:	[unclear]

JA:	Okay.

JC:	[unclear]

JA:	What did you farm at your farm there?

JC:	Just what everybody else farmed, started with cotton.

HC:	[unclear]

JC:	Cotton and [unclear].

HC:	Can’t hear him, so put it on his lapel.  (recording paused)

JA:	Okay, so you grew cotton, and what other kinds of products?

JC:	Cotton lost the price.  Then we got some cows, tried to raise some grain.  Lost everything in [19]20.

JA:	1920 when the cotton crashed?

JC:	Yeah.  You see, the government bought all the cotton in [19]17 and [19]18.  They used it for the war.  Then when the war stopped, then nobody bought cotton.  So then he bought a few cows and some chickens, some turkeys, some ducks.  Had our own garden.  That’s what we lived on while we were raising wheat and whatever—corn, maize, or whatever we could sell.  Had horses, no tractors.  Part of the farm raised the hay for the horses.  And we just lived that way.

HC:	You’re going to have to talk louder, it’s hard to hear you.

JC:	Huh?

HC:	Talk louder.

JC:	And so we lived like that for about four years.  Things began to pick up fast.  The cars came in, and you can sell your produce.  Went back to cotton, and it stayed pretty well.  And some grain.  And did well until the 1928 Crash, and everything blew up.  Then we went back to getting milk from the cows and raising our own chickens and ducks to feed us, and a garden.  And that’s the way we lived for several years.  Oh, and then went into lettuce.  This whole valley went into vegetables.  There was lettuce, there was cabbage, there was carrots, there was broccoli.  They tried to raise … oh, what’s that long stalk thing?  Celery!  And that didn’t do any good.

JA:	Oh, didn’t work here, huh?

JC:	Yeah.  And so there was dairies and a lot of gardens.  They used to ship seven, eight cars of vegetables out of here every day.

JA:	Wow.

JC:	Yeah.  That went on, and then Spreckles Sugar Beet Company came, and they wanted someplace where they could raise sugar beets for seed.  And so we told them we’d go into them.  They promised to give us a nice profit, so that’s the way that was.  They did pretty well on that, raised sugar beet seed.  We started about [19]32 or [19]33, and then they began to crossbreed it and all that stuff.  Oh, about right after the war, a couple of years after the war, then they didn’t need the seed anymore.  They’d crossbred it and took it out to further north, because they could do it cheaper there, or whatever the reason.  Then from then on, grain was good, and we just raised grain and the hay.  And it paid off enough.  That went on until I retired in [19]63.  I was sixty-five then.  And I rented my farm to my nephew, my brother’s boy.  And they farmed it, and they have stayed with grain and hay, until we sold the farm.  We sold it all in one lump.  Our farm was divided by all the family.  So we sold the whole lump in [19]85.  Then we moved here.  My brother bought a farm in Yuma.  He didn’t do much.  He died just a couple years after that.  So his son that I rented my farm to, he got acquainted, and so he took over that farm.

JA:	What’s that man’s name?

JC:	What man?

JA:	Your nephew.

HC:	Tim.

JA:	Tim?

HC:	Timothy Conovaloff.

JC:	No.

HC:	And your brother was Alex.

JC:	My brother was Alex.  He had a boy named…

HC:	Tim!

JC:	No, I’m talking about the guy that’s a doctor now.

HC:	Luke. 

JC:	His name was Luke, named after his father [Lukian Conovaloff 1877-1940.]  And Tim was younger than him by two or three years—went through college, and then he come on the farm, and he’s running the farm in Yuma now.  Farming some of it, and I think he leases out to the vegetables.  And that’s it.

JA:	When you were raising vegetables, and that was taking off around here, was it hard to compete with the Japanese truck farmers, for selling the produce locally?

JC:	Yeah, they were here.  They were good vegetable farmers.  And they were good farmers, they competed.  But there was enough sales for it that it didn’t….

JA:	The market was big enough to bear for it, huh?

JC:	Our main trouble was—or a good [unclear]—was weather.  There was other places, of course.  Colorado raised a lot of it, Texas raised a lot of it, California raised a lot of it.  If California had bad weather, a hailstorm or something, then the others made money.  But if the weather here didn’t rain, we lost a lot of our crop, then the California and the Texas people made money.  And that’s the way it worked for a while. Then the way I get it, I don’t know this all the way, Texas had to depend on the weather, on the rain.  Well then they started drilling wells, oil well drillers.  They have [unclear]. They came in and they would drill wells, and then that made it Texas and those people, and they could raise it cheaper, and they’re closer to the market than we are, and so it quit.  And also the bugs.  What had happened, they started spraying it for bugs.  Bugs would come in.  Well, nature handled that pretty well for a while, but when they went all to vegetables and started spraying, then it threw that off center altogether.  And so it got to where it cost so much, it cost as much to keep the bugs out, almost, as it cost to raise the crop.  And so it left, went to Yuma and Colorado and New Mexico and [unclear].  And as I understand now they raise plenty of vegetables back east, so….  Then dairies grew up here, there was big dairies here.  What’s the biggest dairy?

HC:	Shamrock?

JC:	My memory’s going.

HC:	Carnation?

JC:	Carnation came in, and they didn’t do the dairying, they bought the milk and they made cheese and all of that stuff.  And they’re still here.  And then what’s the other one you said?

HC:	Shamrock.

JC:	Shamrock.  I think they’re the only two left.  The farmers here started a cheese factory and they did real well for a while.  And they sold it, too.  What’s that big cheese factory now, cheese company now?

JA:	Kraft?

JC:	Kraft.  They sold it to Kraft.

JA:	Where was it located?  In Glendale?

JC:	Yeah.

JA:	Was it really?!

JC:	That was in Glendale.  Sold it to Kraft for a while, and I don’t know why they quit, the cheese people quit.  I don’t think it was their fault, I think there was something that shook up in the Kraft Cheese Company and the big companies, so they couldn’t sell it as well, so they quit.  So from then on it was hay and corn and some vegetables.  Vegetables came over into this area.  They used to raise it south of the canals, and they come on this side drilling wells—some, not too much—and they faded out.  And that’s kind of the story.

JA:	Now, take me back to that 1920 cotton crash.  How did that affect your family?

JC:	Well, that’s when we just quit.  My father went to the people he bought the farm from
	and he told them, they understood.  They understood.  A lot of them left here, but my father was determined to stay out of the city.  His motto was, “I don’t want my farm to grow in the city.  City bad, city bad.”  And so we were far away from—Phoenix was not much more than a good-sized village then.  So we were about ten miles away, we never went to town.  He’d go into town once in a while.  We’d go there in the fall and buy some winter clothes and stuff like that.  We raised our own food and enough hay to keep the….  And there was a company here called the Dwight B. Heard Cattle.  There was Heard, and he had a partner—Heard and something—and they were real estate people here.  Everything was crashed, and so he says, “Look, if you think you can make enough to pay taxes on it, stay there until things work out.”  That’s what he did.  He did raise some [unclear].  We had a pretty good flock of chickens.  We used to take our eggs into town and sell them to restaurants.  It made enough to carry us over.  And then in [19]24, things started to raise up, and it was good.  And we raised some cotton in [19]24, and that was pretty good.  And then in [19]28, vegetables began to come in fast, and they were a better crop, so then we quit raising cotton and raised vegetables.

JA:	Now, when things crashed in [19]20, did a lot of the Russian colony disband and go back to L.A.?

JC:	Oh, about 90% of them just up and left.

JA:	How did your family and those few that stayed, how did you feel about being left and deserted like that?

JC:	At that time I was only eleven, twelve years old, I didn’t know what was going on.  I did what my father told me to do, and that’s it.  But they all moved.  But the Tolmachoff clan, they came in here in 1908, and they were pretty well established already, and they were dairying, all of them were dairying, all they had was dairies.  And there was good price for milk.

JA:	So the Tolmachoffs stayed, and your….

JC:	Yeah, they stayed.  Well, I won’t say we’re different, and I won’t say we’re the same, because they lived from a different area in Russia, and we never did know them at all when we came here.  And the group that came from our village, they all went back.  And there was only about five families left, out of about thirty or twenty-eight, thirty, something like that.  They all just….  I remember seeing them go.  They raised up their horses, got a big wagon, got barrels of water on there, and hay, and took off.  They went to Yuma, and then around to Los Angeles.

JA:	That would have had to have been sad, because all of your playmates would have been gone.

JC:	Yeah, [unclear] playmates.  There was three of us boys the same age, left, and we were together all the time.  One of them was my nephew through my oldest sister—John.  One was related to us, but I don’t know how, they never did find out.  We’re about third cousins.  There was a boy, and him and I were really just pretty friendly.  Of course we went to the old country school.  Finally we got to know other people.

JA:	What school was that?

JC:	It was called Pendergast.

JA:	Pendergast?

JC:	Yeah, the Pendergast cattle people were here.  They donated the land for the school, and so they called it the Pendergast.  I don’t know what happened to them, there aren’t any of them around.  They kind of faded out, whether they moved away or died [unclear].  There’s still Pendergasts.  It’s a pretty large school now.  Then, it was….  They had a teacher for two grades.  In our class, we started there in the second grade, and stayed there up till two years of high school, they set up a two-year high school to keep the farm boys here.  By then there was….  But there was six of us in one class, and the class below us had about eight people.  And the teacher had those two classes in the same room.  We would recite:  our classroom, the other half of the room, they’d study, and then they’d recite.  We’d study arithmetic, they’d recited their English and whatever they were studying.  There were only four teachers then, and the principal.  He helped teach some of the classes.  And that went on through two years of high school.  That was finished in 1926.  This third cousin of mine, he and I went on an old Model T Ford to Glendale, and went two years to high school there.

JA:	So you finished up at Glendale High?

JC:	Yeah, Glendale High.

JA:	How did they receive you, being a transfer?

JC:	They were glad in them days.  They wanted outside people, because they got money from the state for that.  So they were glad to take us.  A Phoenix man came out and tried to sell us Phoenix, but it’s too far away, and so on and so on.  Glendale was not too much closer, by about three or four miles.  But anyhow, we went there.  Well, this cousin of mine, he quit when he was a senior.  He didn’t want to stay any longer, so he left, and I went there by myself, and I got acquainted with some of the Tolmachoff boys that was about my age at that time.

JA:	So that’s how you got to know the Tolmachoff’s?

JC:	Got to know the Tolmachoff’s, yeah.

JA:	You didn’t know them very well before that time?

JC:	No, I never went there.

JA:	Oh, you had never met them before.

JC:	Never met them.  All we had was horses, and Sunday….  They started a little church there for about three years, a little church there.

JA:	The Molokan church?
JC:	Yeah.  Well, it’s a branch of the Molokan.  The Molokan church was a big church when it started, back in, I think….  I had a book that I read.  I had to borrow a book and I read it.  They were a large group, and they were all Baptists.  It was a Baptist church, and they did real well.  But there was a friction with the Catholic Church, of course, like any other churches.  And so as time went on—I’m figuring this is back in the early [19]17 year, I think.  I just hear this from word of mouth, and I had a book.  Some of them went Pentecostal.  And so from then on I can’t tell you very much.  They changed, Pentecostal, and then the Pentecostals split.  I was, in a sense, Pentecostal.  They act like them, but they don’t do any tongue-talking.  So that’s the way it was.

JA:	Okay.  Now when you came to Glendale High School, did you participate in any of the athletics that they had there?

JC:	No, I didn’t.  I had to milk the cows before I left, and milk them when I’d come back, un-harness the horses.  When the workmen would come in, bring the horses in, time to un-harness them and so on, it took another half-hour, and they were paying them by the hour, so we had to do that.  [Milk the cows, get the hay, feed the horses, pump water for the horses and cows, and feed them.  We’d get [out of school] at four o’clock then.  We’d be home between 4:30 and 5:00.  We worked until eight o’clock that night to get everything set up.  And in the morning, we’d get up about 5:30 or 6:00 and milk the cows and feed them.  Well, Father would start hitching the horses up then, for when the men came to plow or whatever they were doing.  Their horses were ready, they were right out in the field.  That saved him a couple of hours a day of work.

JA:	Who did he hire?  Did he hire Mexicans to do the work?

JC:	Mexicans, yeah.  Oh, now and then there would be somebody moving from the East who wanted a job to pay their way, to be moving somewhere else.  They’d stop here and work during the plowing.  In those days, anybody that came here could get a job.  All they needed is to know how to handle a horse or a scythe or a hay rake.  He got a job.  Everybody could get a job, everybody that needed a job.  Everything was [unclear].  A hoe was [unclear].  There was weeds here till you can’t believe!  You always could get a job hoeing with a hoe.

JA:	Weeds were terrible, huh?

JC:	Or a shovel.  Some weeds you had to have a shovel to get them out, they were so strong … woody stalk.  And then the Johnson grass was worst of all.  They brought it in from I-don’t-know-where.  I heard it was from Africa [unclear].  This was cattle country, of course, and Johnson grass was feed, if you can get it while it’s tender, but it got tough real quick, with the people that’d raise it.  And it has a rhizome root.  You plant one here, and the first thing you know, its roots [are] way over there someplace.  And it was hard to kill.  You can’t kill it because you leave a piece on it like that, and week later it [unclear].  And that [help] cost us a lot.  I don’t know what Father paid for them, but we had a dozen of them all the time.

JA:	Always cleaning weeds?

JC:	Yeah.  And that went on until the late twenties, [19]28, [19]29.  I finished high school in [19]28; [19]29 we were raising lettuce and we had to spray the lettuce. We had a two-wheeled heavy cart, had a barrel on it, and a pump that was activated by the chain, on a sprocket on the axle, and it turned, and it turned the pump.  And I would drive it up and down, spray that.  That was one of the jobs I had.  I hated it.  I’d have to fill it, set those things just right [unclear] spray.

JA:	Why did you hate it?  What about it was terrible?

JC:	Before this, the stuff was poisonous as could be.  You had to have gloves.  If you smelled much of it, you’d get sick.  Hard work.  Slow.  Had to hurry, because the bugs were already eating the other side of the field.  And the mothers would lay their eggs in the lettuce plant.  When it’s that big, they’d start laying their eggs in the lettuce plants.  We sprayed.  And I can’t remember the first poison that we used.  Mixed it with water, and it was poisonous.  You can’t go near it.  I can’t think of the name of it now.  And we just used that about two years.  Then they had other poisons come in that weren’t near as poisonous.  And then in [19]28 and [19]29 … [19]29, we bought us a three-wheeled McCormick-Deering tractor.  It was about eight horsepower, I think—less than that.  Pull those things, and that tractor made it a lot easier.  Get up in the morning, you don’t have to feed a horse a lot of oats.  And you could move faster, add a pump, running that.  And from then on, then they got sprayers and could spray about half an acre at a time.  At that point you can do it in a day and you’re through.  And the poison then was not poisonous to humans.  I mean, up to a point.  You couldn’t breathe it all the time.  I got a few whiffs of it.

JA:	Was the tractor that you just described the first automated machinery that you had?

JC:	It was the first one that took the place of horses.  But we had a tractor, it was a McCormick-Deering, International 53 Company, or whatever you call them.  And it had a two-bottom plow, it’d pull a two-bottom plow.  And it’s still faster than horses.  And we put a light on it, a light bulb pointing just in front of where you’re going.  And it just had a battery set on it, and it would run most of the night.  Then we’d take it off during the day, and take it down to Tolleson where they had a gas station, and they had a charger, and we’d charge it up.

JA:	So you could work all night.

JC:	Well, I did most of the nights—all night, when I could.  A lot of times I had to do something else during the day.  Then I’d work [unclear] until I got sleepy.  I’d work till twelve, one o’clock, and then I’d go home.  Five, six o’clock, I was up again.

JA:	They call those the “good ol’ days,” right?

JC:	In a way, it was good.  We were happy.  We had a large family, and our family stayed together, and this cousin—I don’t know, I’m guessing he’s about a third cousin of ours, but still they’re on our family tree.  And they had several children, we played together.  Sundays….  The river was alive then, the Salt River, and there was fish you can’t believe.  Sundays we’d get on our horses, go down there, take some wood.  There was lots of wood there [unclear].  And we’d take some bread and something else, and we’d go down and catch a fish, roast it there and have a fish party with a group, and we just had a ball!  Certain places where the edge was washed out, place where the water was seven, eight feet deep, with a tree growing right over it.  We’d climb up on this tree and dive off.  And we spent Sunday, we had fun that these people today will never dream about.  We had a picnic!

JA:	Sounds marvelous!  What kind of fish did you catch out of the Salt?

JC:	Mostly….  I can’t think of their name now….  Carp!  They were about that big, had scales about that big.

JA:	Big scales, yeah.

JC:	And they were easy to peel.  You could take a dull knife and just peel them off.  Get a frying pan, or we’d get a big can and just boil them.  Then we’d take them out and hold them [unclear].  Every time you bit into it, you had some bones.  You’d bite on that, feel a bone, pull them out, and then you’d chew [unclear].  And then there was trout—not very much, but now and then you’d get a trout.  And bass.  There was quite a few bass.  We finally got smart, we took some potato sacks, and we’d rip them and sew them together, and we’d go to a place where the water was running fast, had two men holding it on each end.  We’d go up the river and swim down, and fish, and we’d get half a dozen of them [unclear].  And then we really had a ball!  We’d save enough of them, put water in some buckets—cold water—and let them swim there and bring them home.

JA:	That way your parents could have some fresh fish too?

JC:	[unclear] home.  They’d cook it.  My sister, the younger one, she was a good cook.  She was perfection, everything she cooked.  She made that fish taste good!  So we had that.  And then we’d go out and go hunting, all the, with jackrabbits and squirrels and rattlesnakes, and you name it.  And we’d shoot the jackrabbits.  That was good, because a lot of them would come out there and if it was a dry summer or something, they’re out there eating your cotton and your corn and everything else.

JA:	Did you eat jackrabbits?

JC:	No, they weren’t fit to eat.  Desert jackrabbit was raised on cactus!

JA:	Not worth much, are they?

JC:	They weren’t rabbits, they were hares.
HC:	Contrary to the Bible.

JA:	Jackrabbits?

JC:	They weren’t rabbits, they were hares.  And the fellows wouldn’t weigh a pound—all bones.  They run by jumping.  They jump from here over to that wall in one jump, like kangaroos.  And yet we can get one now and then, fill them up with our .22 and [unclear].  Not very many, but we killed one or two a day.

JA:	I saw five of them playing in the ASU-West field right here, when they first started building the buildings.  They were playing out here, just across the street from you.

JC:	Yeah, this section was full of them.  And when they started leveling the ground, they were everywhere.  The shopping center was full of them, and the people would complain they didn’t want them there.  They’d chase them out, and here come another batch.  They were running in every direction, wild.  And then just west of us here, that section was empty, and there was a lot of them there—but there was nothing there.  This hospital was built just….

 JC:	… somewhere in the spring of [19]88 this opened.  All that time it was full of rabbits too.

JA:	My goodness.

JC:	Now, of course, I don’t know where they went.  They keep going west, I guess.

JA:	I suppose.  Push them back out into what is really the desert now.  They got caught in town.

JC:	Yeah.

JA:	Did you folks come to Glendale very often for shopping or anything like that?

JC:	No, we went to Phoenix when it’s shopping.  In the winter, it took us a week to get a wagonload of cotton.  That was from [19]24 to [19]28, those four years, cotton was pretty good, it made a living.  That’s when Father began to make payments on the farm, from that cotton.  And we’d haul a load in, and there was a gin on what is now the fairgrounds, but across the street from the fairgrounds, across the railroad.  There was a gin there.  And a lot of times as soon as they’d gin it out, they’ll weigh the seed, and they pay you for the seed.  And it usually paid for the ginning.  And then you’d leave the baled cotton, and within several days there’d be someone come out there and buy it.  And then the next week, Saturday, we’d haul in another.  And that lasted for a couple of months.  Of course I was going to school most of the time then, but Saturdays I would get up about five, when it’s dark.  Cold!  And [unclear] you go ahead, and I’ll get our fast … we had a fast horse that trotted … get down in an hour, a little more than hour, he’d get to….  And so then we’d come home.  But if we needed something, then we would leave the wagon there and get horseback on him and drive into town where they had the big stable for horses there.  It was right on First Avenue and what’s the street south of Washington?

JA:	Jefferson.

JC:	Jefferson!  Right there they had a big stable and they’d feed your horses and they’d shed them for you.  They had a big water tank.  Well, we’d tie them there, and didn’t have to walk more than two blocks to get to the outside of Phoenix.  There were stores:  we needed some clothes maybe, or we needed whatever.  Father maybe needed a tool.  Get that, and then up on the horses and come back home after dark.

JA:	That’s a long ride!

JC:	Yeah, it’s pretty long.  Of course going back the horses can trot, the wagon was empty.

JA:	Yeah.  So it’d be a little bit faster going….

JC:	The fairgrounds [Arizona State Fairgrounds] was already there.  It was a small fairground.  It wasn’t very much, but it still was….  They had the carnival there.  At that time, every year there’d be some new equipment come up.  They were changing equipment fast as you….  And they’d always have [unclear].  And it had the farm….  People would come to buy cattle and they’d show what they’ve got.  The kids would raise a pig or a sheep or a goat or something.  They’d bring them in there, show pieces, and they’d get their prize.  There’d be a five-dollar bill maybe, which in them days was a lot of money.  Of course the carnival.  And the stadium was there already, and they’d have car races there, horse races.  They had a mile around it, and then another one inside of it that was a half a mile.  So the race horses were usually on that half a mile.  The car races were around with the [mile],  And they had two men on the car then.  One of them was pumping oil, and the other one was driving.  They didn’t have automatic oil pumps then.  He was sitting on that side, a-pumping away.  (laughs)

JA:	No kidding!

JC:	Yeah, it was just an open car.  They had the glasses, just burning up the load about 35 miles an hour!

JA:	And you would go in to watch the races?

JC:	Oh yeah, [unclear] the races, sure.  Can’t go in.  From the stadium we watched it.  The stadium is still there—not the….

JA:	Not the coliseum.

JC:	Not the [coliseum]—the other one just west of it.  Yeah.  And then they had some clowns here and there, stuff like sideshows.  Hot dogs and pop.  Then he wants to know about the Molokans.

JA:	Yeah, I’m weaving different things in.  Did you ever go to events in Glendale as a family?  Did they have big social events or any kinds of picnics or things like that?

JC:	Our people stayed by themselves.  They wouldn’t mix outside.

JA:	How come?

JC:	I guess mostly religion.  Our people took the Jewish food, and they don’t eat Jewish food, that’s all they’d eat—kosher.  So they slaughtered their own.  At first we couldn’t keep it at home, so we ate chicken or duck.  That’s all the meat we had.  And then not so much ducks, but geese was better, a larger bird, and it would eat grass.  So we always raised a bunch of them.  And in the winter we could kill two or three at a time, just hang it in the cellar, and it would keep until we ate it.  Summertime, we just killed a duck or a chicken or a rooster—kept the chickens for eggs.  And that was our meat.  And up until the war, we still, when we moved away from the family, [unclear] and I, we had a bunch of chickens.

HC:	And turkeys.

JC:	And a cow for ourselves.  That was through, well, up until the war.

HC:	And turkeys and ducks.

JC:	Then I raised some turkeys and ducks.  I raised about six or seven turkeys, and I’d take them in, and for twenty-five cents you can get them dressed up and packaged and frozen for you, and then they’d keep them there, and you’d pick them up when you needed them.

JA:	Oh, no kidding?!  They would store meat?

JC:	I’d have them quartered, and about once a week or once a month, I’d go there and get a quarter of a turkey, and we had turkey.

HC:	They had a freezer there, in that store.

JA:	Whose store was it?

JC:	In Tolleson there was a freezer.  They had a grocery store there.  By that time there was more people here, and there were grocery stores—pretty big grocery store, had all kinds of stuff.  Then they had the hardware store by then.  Up till then, the grocery store was the hardware store.  Then we would raise a calf or a goat—not a goat so much, but sheep.  The sheepherders would come in here about the middle of February, and they would breed their sheep to lamb about the first of March.  And they would bring here, and the alfalfa man—they couldn’t make hay from alfalfa, but there was enough of it there to feed the sheep.  And they would rent [unclear] out, and the sheep would be there until they lambed, and they’re old enough—the lambs—to move back, they take them back up in the mountains.

JA:	Those are the Basque people?

JC:	Yeah.

JA:	Did you ever get to know any of them?

JC:	Oh yeah.  They talked Spanish, and I talk it as well as I can talk English to you.  And the Mexican kids that came to work for us, we’d just furnish them tents and gave them a stove, tin dishes, and they cooked their own stuff.  Every Saturday they’d go to Tolleson to get a week’s supply of food—beans is about all they bought.  [unclear] tortillas and beans, and you walk into that camp to talk to them, they’re sitting there eating tortillas and beans.  And they were smart, they were healthier than the rest of us were.

JA:	How come?

JC:	Well, they ate beans!

JA:	Beans is better for you than duck?

JC:	[unclear]

HC:	The ducks are fat.  A lot of fat.

JC:	I understand that them red beans is about as healthy a food as you can get.  I still ride my wife so she’ll keep feeding beans.  I went to the restaurant for a treat with some folks, and they were pretty well-to-do folks.  They were ordering steak and [unclear].  I said, “Give me a bowl of beans.”  [unclear]  And they were delicious, just as Mexican [unclear].  I ate those things like….  But anyhow, where’d we get off the road?  That’s about all I can tell you.

JA:	Tell me something about the Molokan church in the earlier years.  When everybody left, what happened, and how did it stay alive?

JC:	Well, there was still enough of us to hold church.  There was about four or five families.  And us kids, we went to church along with them, and they’d have a service.

JA:	Describe a service for me.  What-all would take place?

JC:	Well, not much different from any other would.  They have songs that they take the words from psalms:  like, say, the first psalm.  And they would cook up a tune for it.  They must have did something [unclear], and short, see.  And so the fellow would say, “Well, Mr. X, will you start a song for us?”  So he would, he’d know the tune for that certain psalm.  And he’d read the first line, the first sentence, and he’d stop, and they would shout out, or call out, or say it out, the second line, and then they would sing the second line that way.  Third line on down, until they finished the song.  And then after the song is finished, a man was called out to give a talk, the pastor.  They don’t have a preacher, they have a….  I can’t think of it.

HC:	Minister.

JC:	No.

JA:	Do you mean an elder?

JC:	An elder or….  A presbyter!  He’s not a preacher.  He’s a kind of a chairman or an elder.  And he would say, “Well, Mr. X, will you give us a talk?”  Maybe he’d just pick up and read a psalm, or maybe [unclear] he’d read a chapter, and maybe make a few comments on it, and that was it.  Then they’d sing another song.  After two or three of them, then they have prayer session.  And of course the ladies sit by themselves and the men by themselves.  Some people would announce they would want prayer for so-and-so, mother’s sick or something.  And they would get in front, see.  And they’d get on their knees, and the presbyter would lead the prayer, and the others would pray silently to themselves.  And when they got [unclear], that’s it.  And they’d sing another song.  Then they would kiss everybody.  It was always one family.  They would start here, and they’d go around kissing everybody.

JA:	Did they kiss them on the cheeks, or….

JC:	No, just a peck on … sometimes on the cheek, sometimes on the lips, whichever one the fellow chose.  And they’d sing whatcha call it—go home song—I’m trying to think of that.  A farewell song, or….

HC:	Farewell.

JC:	Not farewell, that doesn’t sound right.  But a song that….

JA:	Benedictory?

JC:	Whatever [unclear].

JA:	Sing it for me.

JC:	I forgot them already!  [unclear]  I can’t sing.

HC:	(Sings in Russian)  [unclear]  “Brothers and sisters rejoice, the Lord is here.”

JC:	But anyhow, then they’d scatter and that’s it.  It’d take about an hour and a half, two hours, depending on how long the speaker….  If the fellow picked a pretty long verse, he would….  They didn’t do it all the time, but before the church they would call the children in and give them a little talk on the Bible.  The main thing was to memorize the Ten Commandments, memorize them.  And then the kids would go out and play, and the church went on.  Some of them stayed in just to sit there and listen, the parents [unclear] stay in, sit.

JA:	Did some of the Molokans start coming back after the big crash in [19]20?  Did they return?

JC:	Very, very few.  Very few came back.  And they hardly ever stayed more than two years, and then they’d leave again.  [unclear] they leave again.

JA:	So how did the colony survive, if so few were here?

JC:	Well, it wasn’t a colony anymore.  Lived half a mile apart.  There was a house to every  weedstwenty acres on both sides of the street.  Everybody bought twenty acres, figured that’s as far as we could handle.  You need a team of horses, that’s all you’d need.  And they’d plow all winter, and then harrow their ground, and raise borders every so often.  And you couldn’t raise much of a border with a team.  They’d make the borders, and then they’d flood it, follow the water, if it started running over, they’d have to shovel it in.

JA:	So you would irrigate, you used water from the Arizona Canal?

JC:	Yeah.  We’d irrigate starting February or March.  Tried to irrigate it in March, and by the end of March, first of [April], the frost would be off, and then they would plant.  They would harrow it, level it the best they can.  By then, after a while, they began to have four horses, and they’d get familiar to….  And they would plant it.  Had a thing just like this, kind of shoved, made little furrows so it’d get down to the moisture.  And an old wheel behind it that would kind of pack it a little.  And then about a week later, get ready with a hoe and start hoeing the Johnson [grass].  They didn’t start until April, about May, before it started, and then you started hoeing it.  They would thin it out.

JA:	Now, is there a difference between Johnson grass and Bermuda grass?

JC:	Oh, all kinds of difference.

JA:	Okay.  I have a difference in my mind.  I think I know what Johnson [grass] is.

HC:	Johnson [grass] is weeds.

JA:	Yeah, it gets a stalk on the bottom of it as big as that sometimes.

JC:	No, it’s a grass, it doesn’t have a stalk.  It’s a grass, like wheat.  Wheat doesn’t have stalks.  It’s the grass family.

JA:	Yeah.  It grows up, right?

JC:	Yeah, the stalks get all about seven, eight feet high.

JA:	Yeah. that’s what I’m thinking of.

JC:	You know what a maize plant looks like?

JA:	Uh-huh.

JC:	What do they call it in the East?  Kafir corn.  Well, it’s a kafir corn family.  It has a head on it, just like that, but the seeds are real small, we can’t do nothing with it.  But Bermuda grass, in the fact that it has a rhizome root, it’s related, but other than that, it’s not related.

JA:	Okay.  I’d never heard anybody tell me for sure….

JC:	All these lawns is Bermuda grass.  It’s not the true Bermuda, it’s….  Can’t remember anything anymore.

JA:	One other thing that I’m curious about:  during World War II, now the Molokans are peace people, so how did they handle World War II?  Was there any trouble with having to register?

JC:	Well, there weren’t very many like that.  They took them into the mountains and had them cutting fire paths.  They took them there, and they were out there.  They were cleaning the brush out, a wide-enough path, right on top of peak of the mountain in the forest, and made a big pass.  They did that work.

JA:	Fire breaks?

JC:	Yeah.  And there weren’t very many of them, very small percent, maybe I think it was hardly 10%.  The rest of them went in as noncombatant, and they were there, whatever they were doing.  But the rest of them all went [unclear].  The parents didn’t like it, but we’re Americans.  The parents didn’t like it.  In Russia, [unclear] they came [unclear] like the Quakers.  And they made a contract [unclear], I’m way off of the truth here, I got it from word of mouth here and there, no telling what it was—that they made an agreement with the king or whoever, his doom, they call that a doom.

HC:	Czar.

JC:	Czar.  He’s just a Russianized form of the name “Caesar.”  That’s what it is.  And they made an agreement, and he has his, what the president now has.  What do they call the twelve men he has there?

JA:	His cabinet?

JC:	The cabinet.  And then of course the priest was there too, and told them what they could do and what they couldn’t, blah, blah.  If they went to this country, stay [unclear], it was far, just wild, no people in it.  He said, “You go to that country and we’ll give you ninety years you will not have to go to war, when Russia goes to war.”  [unclear] these peace people moved over there.  And they did pretty well.  There’s a lot of rivers there, and streams, and everybody … there was always a stream, and there would be several houses there, and then they would break up their land.  You can’t buy land there.  They just break it up, this family has five children, they get this much.  And they would have their garden, they would have their house.  Not too far away, near the forest or their grassland, they would take their cows and their sheep out there and pasture them all day and bring them back at night.  And the garden here was mostly cabbage and potatoes.  And that was their main meal.  Of course they raised other stuff too.  And they had chickens—geese mostly.  The geese could weather the winter better than any other bird.  And then they got the pin feathers, the down from them, there to make their bedding—pillows and their….

HC:	Mattress.

JC:	They’d fill a big bag full of it, and when they lay down in it, they’d sink and the thing would cover them up.  [unclear]

JA:	Now, did you have those kinds of beds here as well?

JC:	One day they just came with it.  Their family had some.  We had it.  

HC:	Your mother gave us one for our wedding.

JC:	And as the mattresses came in, they 

JA:	They bought new stuff?

JC:	Went for the mattresses, yeah.

JA:	Did the Molokans here in the Tolleson-Glendale area….

JC:	We’re the only ones there, only we’re not there now.  Well, this family that’s a third cousin of mine, he’s still holding onto his farm out there.

JA:	What I was going to ask is, as new innovations came, like kitchen appliances and those kinds of things, were you free to purchase what was new and up-and-coming?

JC:	They held back for a while.  Even when we were married, we got us a wood stove, and we had a wood stove.  We didn’t need the [dishes?] that they have now.  They just had their cups, and their cups had glasses and saucers and pans.  My mother used to make bread.  They had an oven, it was a brick oven that was outside of the house.  It’s about five feet long and three feet wide, made out of brick plastered with mud on the outside.  And they put a lot of wood in there and when it burned up, turned to coal, they would spread that all around, and they’d put their pans and loaves in, and they were that big, and set them up around here and there.  By the time it’s cooled down, the bread was baked.  That’s why we had bread.

JA:	I’ll bet you could smell that for miles away!

JC:	You’d better believe it!  That’s a smell that made you hungry, too.  It cooked that way.  We never did have—until our parents died, we still had a wood stove.  And when we moved, about, what was it two years we had the [wood] stove, and then we bought us an electric stove?  Something like that.

HC:	We had that stove till we moved here.  We had a wood stove, and my mother would come from L.A. and say, “It cooks better than my gas stove!”  She sure liked it.

JC:	“The food tastes better out of this stove than my gas stove!”  I don’t remember when we bought the first stove.

HC:	Well that’s the only stove we had.  We didn’t have any other stove.  The wood stove is the only stove we had.

JC:	Only stove we had.  And then….

JA:	Did you have a refrigerator?

HC:	Ice box.

JC:	Just an ice box.  People would drive through every day or every other day, and fill your [box] with ice—the top, about that big—filled with ice, and the bottom was right under it was where you put the food.

JA:	And the ice came from Glendale, right?

JC:	Uh-huh, they had a big ice plant there.

HC:	And [unclear].

JC:	Later on, Tolleson put an ice plant there too, because there was a big market for iced vegetables.  They had to ice the cars for vegetables, whether it was potatoes or carrots or whatever, they still iced them.

JA:	So Tolleson had its own ice plant as well?

JC:	Yeah, they had a plant.

JA:	And you iced the railroad cars in Tolleson?

JC:	Uh-huh, right there.
JA:	I didn’t know about that.

JC:	They started to bring them.  There was an ice plant on Grand Avenue, three or four blocks south of Six Points and Five Points.  And that’s not there.  And then somebody came along and said, “Well, why do that?  I’ll just [unclear].”  His name was….  He was a very nice man.  Oh, he sure helped the country.  He would help anybody.  And he would tell us, “Boys, go buy some land.  I don’t care what you do, but buy some land.  This place hasn’t even touched what it’s going to be.”  [unclear]  “By the time you’re an old man,” he said, “you’ll be a millionaire.”  Well, you couldn’t afford to buy it.

JA:	Yeah, those were hard times.

JC:	Selling for seventy-five, eighty dollars an acre, and yet you couldn’t afford it.  [unclear]  Oh, you knew the man in your church.

HC:	Yeah, I was trying to think of him, because his [unclear].

JC:	He works with us now.

HC:	I know it.  We made chicken dinners [unclear] watchman.  He was a bachelor.  Then he joined the church.  I couldn’t think of him [unclear].

JC:	[unclear] he had a man working for him, all through.  And it was time to retire, he gave him a….  That was before Social Security.  He gave him a pension.  What was his name, the [unclear].

HC:	Andy.

JC:	And he said, “As long as you live,” he said, “I’ll give you a pension.”

HC:	Well they were all buddies from their single days.

JC:	Well, they were friends anyway, yeah.

JA:	I’ll be.

JC:	And he’s a type of a fellow.  “Anything I can do for you.”  And a lot of people that could do it by the book, a lot of them, well, they….

JA:	During the Great Depression, from 1930 on, were you able to maintain a profitable farm, or was it pretty hard to do that?

JC:	Well, if you could keep clothes and shoes and cheese and chickens, you was rich.

HC:	We had our own cow.

JC:	We didn’t even know there was a depression.

HC:	Well, we got married in [19]36.

JC:	We never had any money.  [unclear]  We’d go to town sometimes and they would give us fifty cents to buy candy with or something.  And we [would say], “What can I do with all this?!” and we wouldn’t spend it all.

HC:	When we were married, John and I, I lived with them for almost a year, and we’d each get fifty cents.  See, my husband was twenty-seven when we met and married, so he worked with his dad all of the years.

JC:	Everything was in our father.  [unclear] brought from the Russia.  He had everything in his hand.  He wouldn’t give us anything unless we needed it—not that he was stingy or tight.  It was built-into him and he didn’t want us to go out.  He wanted a big family.  He said, “I want a big family around here, we’ll get around the table, we’ll sing songs.”  But it got to where there were too many cooks in the kitchen, and so we had to separate.

JA:	Makes it pretty hard, doesn’t it?

JC:	Yeah, [unclear] separate.  Then he built us a home, drilled us a well, and gave me five hundred dollars.  He said, “Here it is, John, take it forever.”  He gave us forty acres, it was paid for already.  So I used his equipment the first year, or a little more than the first year.  After I got a couple of crops, why, I bought a small tractor.  We still had horses, and I would use them sometimes if the tractors were busy—for planting or for cultivating.  And before long I bought me a John Deere three-wheeled tractor.  That was a happy thing.  We did some of my work.  Of course I’d plow.  At that time, Father bought a small Caterpillar tractor and they would let me plow my land with that tractor, and take a heavy harrow.  And from then on, why, I just used the little tractor to do my planting and seeding and so on.  I just raised wheat at that time, and it didn’t take much equipment for that.

HC:	We had cotton later, and a lot of Mexican workers.  We didn’t have the machinery that picks cotton now, you know.  We had a lot of Mexican workers.

JC:	Well, that was after the war already.

HC:	Well, still….

JA:	So you grew wheat during the Depression period, is that what you’re saying?

JC:	Wheat?  Yeah, [combine] pulled by horses.  It took, I think, eight horses to pull it, and what we called the bull wheel was to the….

[END OF TAPE ONE]

JA:	I’m sorry, give me those prices again.  Barley was….

JC:	Barley was less than a cent a pound.  I mean, it would be 75¢ for a hundred pounds.  It’s all right, it didn’t cost us anything to raise it.  Didn’t cost anything.  By that time, barley didn’t take much help.  We didn’t have to have a lot of help, we did it all.  My three sisters and I and my brother, we was out there chopping weeds all the time, and irrigating it.  But the winter, when everything [unclear] plowing and horses.  In nineteen … twenty … I guess in [19]27, we bought that first International tractor, McCormick-Deering Company.  It was called International.  Whether it changed or joined it, I don’t know.

JA:	I think they were all one.

JC:	Then we run that tractor day and night, it was easier.  Then we could raise cotton.  So we raised some cotton then.  I think we got….  They would buy it for 8¢ a pound, with the seed.  And there was an outfit there that would do that.  They’d weigh the wagon load, take the load off into the gin.  Sometimes they were ginning, and sometimes they had their own [unclear] faster than the gin could handle it, they’d dump it.  And then they’d pay 8¢ a pound and they’d give you a check.

JA:	Did you ever buy supplies from the Southwest Flour & Feed in Glendale?

JC:	That’s who we bought it from.

JA:	That’s who you bought your seed from?

JC:	We sold all our grain to them, bought our seed from them, our tools—small tools, that’s all they had in the store—shovels and canvas to make canvas dams with when we irrigate, and hoes, and hand planters of various kinds, tools.  They were good to us.  If we’d run out of money, they’d say, “Well, okay, what do you need?  And when you bring your wheat in here, I’ll take whatever you owe me, and you go on with the rest.”  He [did that] for the whole Russian clan, they all hauled it there.

JA:	So Harry Bonsall was good to you guys?

JC:	Oh! he was good to us!  It made us sick when he lost that place.  He lost his mind.  I came up to him a little while later—well, not just a little, maybe a year later, didn’t see him—and I met him in Glendale, and he didn’t recognize me.  We’d go into his office, sit there and chat.  He would tell me, “John, I’ll tell you something.”  I said, “Okay, what?”  “Disagree with anybody you like.  Any time, disagree with them all you want, but don’t be disagreeable about it, and you’ll make your way.”  He told me that motto, and I always kept it.

JA:	Sure.

JC:	And it paid off.

JA:	And did he live by that himself, he was not disagreeable in his dealings?

JC:	Oh no, never.  He would lean backwards over for anybody at any time.  He lost quite a bit.  He lost quite a bit by doing that.

JA:	By being generous?

JC:	Yeah.  I know people that would just leave.

HC:	I went to him to solicit for orphans or missions, and he’d give me one every year.

JC:	Huh?

HC:	Bonsall gave me an offering for the church.  I went there once a year.

JC:	[unclear]  The first Christian school was thought of by a group of business people here, and I knew some of them.  And they said, “John, we’re going to build a school here, a Christian school here.  It’s getting to where the schools are….  We want our children….”  I said, “Okay, I’ll go in, I’ll help.”  And so they bought a piece of ground just up there on Indian School Road now.

JA:	Seventeen thousand.

JC:	Seventeen thousand.

JA:	That’s where I went to school.

JC:	You did? 

JA:	Yeah.

JC:	Well, good!  Who was president then at that time?

JA:	Lloyd Crenshaw.  Dr. Crenshaw was the principal.

JC:	I knew most of them.  I forgot the name of the man that’s there.  His daughter’s married to a friend that’s a partner that’s with us now.  [unclear]

JA:	Wrights?

JC:	No, it’s got two “O’s” in it.  Not Cook.  I don’t know.  Short fellow.  Well 
anyhow, that’s beside the point.  And so I took my tractors out there and I disked up—it 
was just weeds, and just everything.  I disked it all up and plowed the weeds up, took it 
home.  Then when they made the sewer line there, I re-buried it for them.  And then some 
of the farmers would come in with their equipment and leveled it all off.  And there was a 
man that was a brick layer that was a Christian, and he was retired, and he [did] all the 
bricklaying work.  He’d come out there in the morning and there he was, laying bricks.  I
forgot…