Grass Valley When I was in the seventh grade, my parents decided it was time to get out of the city. A good friend had recently moved to Auburn, California, so they started looking around there and found a piece of property and put a camping trailer on it and we camped there the next summer. By this time, my dad had started his own shop and moving it was going to be a large job. He ended up finding a place in Grass Valley where he could put his machines. He got acquainted with another Adventist that owned a business on Bennett Street named Edgar Rogers. He made parts for tractors and bulldozers and he let my dad use part of a building where the public-school buses are parked today. My parents found a house for sale just walking distance from the new Echo Ridge School. Frank Baughman was the principal and teacher of grades five through eight. Dorothea Larsen taught grades one through four. My other grandma came to live with us when we moved up to Grass Valley. She always stayed in a trailer parked behind the shop except for several years when she rented a two-story house and took in other elderly people that were no longer able to care for themselves. She was in good health and had no problems passing the physical to get a license for a care home. My dad's sister, Shirley Cossentine, stayed with her and helped her much of the time. Here's a picture of my grandma and her children, Shirley, my dad, Arnold, Val and Dale. It was about this time that I became interested in repairing old clocks and watches. My grandfather had left an old mantle clock that didn't work and I successfully fixed it. I had several watches and one of them just had a broken mainspring. I asked my grandma if she would stop at one to the jewelry stores on Mill Street when she went to town and ask if the proprietor would sell me a main spring. She did and I installed it and it immediately broke again. I sent it back with her with the following note to see if I could get one that didn't break. The repairman, Art Lolmaugh asked to meet the boy who was interested in repairing watches. Grandma took me with her next time and thus began a long friendship with a great gentleman who sold me watch tools and gave me old catalogs and many hints on how to fix things in a watch. He admitted to selling me an old carbon steel mainspring the first time instead of the newer bimetal ones that were available. It was hard moving from a big school with 30 kids in one grade to having just four in my class and the other three were girls. I was miserable, but found some joy in getting acquainted with Geza Hufnagel. He was the father of Fred Hufnagel who owned the subdivision and had donated the land for the new school. Most people who knew him called him Grandpa Hufnagel. He was building a house just around the corner from ours. He was retired and involved in nature photography. He built a dark room in his house and I learned all about developing black and white pictures from him. He loved taking pictures of birds. He had been a member of the National Audubon Society in Michigan and had acquired some interesting tools to use. He had several black nylon bird catching nets from China that were so fine that birds couldn't see them and would get caught when flying through them. I guess in China they used the birds for soup. I heard they were illegal in this country, but we used them to catch several birds and then put them in a glass cage especially made for this purpose. It could be set up with tree branches or anything you wanted and you could take pictures from inside a canvas blind set up next to it. This would help the bird to relax and act natural. He also liked to take pictures of bird's nests with the babies being fed by their parents. When I found a Black Headed Grosbeak nest in my parent's backyard, he built a wooden platform near the tree and then put a canvas blind on top of the platform. He did all this a little each day to give the birds time to acclimate to the new objects in their neighborhood. The parent birds still recognized it was a strange object and would come and go with their backs to the camera, but we did get some good pictures. One day, we caught an Oregon Junco in the captive net and in removing him, his tail feathers were pulled out. This meant he couldn't fly, so I put him in an old birdcage until his feathers grew out again. I put him in my grandma's bedroom and she enjoyed him so much we kept him over that winter. He became as tame as any hand raised bird. I took him to Echo Ridge School and put him in Dorothea Larsen's classroom for the grades one to four to enjoy for several days. They would let him out to hop along the window sill and he would go back in the cage when he was hungry. One day, he hopped outside when someone left the door open and I thought he was gone. I put the cage outside on the sidewalk anyway, and a little while later, he came hopping down the sidewalk and hopped right into the cage. Grandpa Hufnagel had extensive photography equipment. He had a Cine-Kodak special movie camera that had a time-lapse attachment. It enabled you to take a picture or frame every minute or hour or whatever you set it on. It was great to show flowers opening up or plants growing. He had some nice nature programs showing him on trips with his canoe. My dad and I worked the projector for one program he gave at Pine Hills School. Sadly, as he got older, he could no longer put together a good program and people remember him as being stubborn and fault finding. I took a weeklong trip with him to Arizona to take pictures of the cactus flowers. We visited the Desert Museum in Phoenix and the Oregon Pipe Cactus National Monument. On the way back we stopped in Death Valley and saw Scotty's Castle.

Southern California I didn't really know my grandfathers as they died while I was preschool age. I do remember my mother's father; grandpa Edison would try to play tag with me. One time he went with my mom and me to the grocery store. We stayed in the car while she ran in for just a few minutes but I became very concerned about what dire things were going to happen to us if she didn't come back. Grandpa tried to assure me that he could take care of things and could even drive the car if necessary. Another time I remember he took me to visit one of the neighbors and bought me an ice cream cone. My grandma Edison lived many years longer until after I was married and Laurie was born. She loved to tell me stories about her childhood on the farm in Minnesota, growing up with her two brothers. Prairie fires were a constant threat in those days and one time when they saw smoke heading their way she was left in the house to care for her baby brother while the rest of the family went to work on making fire breaks. She was convinced she was going to die, and crawled into her baby brother's crib with him and her parents found them both fast asleep when they returned. Grandma Edison caught polio while just a child and remembers her dad found some kind of vibrating machine with which he spent hours massaging her legs. After she recovered, one leg was shorter than the other and she always wore a raised shoe on one foot. Grandma moved to southern California as soon as she could, to get away from the snow, and there she met my grandpa. She had a degree in domestic science from Carlton College and loved to cook. She opened a "sweetshop" in Culver City. It was frequented by some of the people working on the movie making sets that were there in the 1920's. She said she could make a dozen pies before breakfast. I was born in Altadena, California, a suburb of Pasadena. My parents met at Lynwood Academy and were living in Lynwood when I was born. When I was two, they bought five acres in San Fernando Valley and built a house. Grandpa and grandma Edison came to live with us at this time. It was a great place to grow up with plenty of room to roam and make pretend forts, etc. I started first grade in the new San Fernando Valley Academy. It had just been moved to a new location on Lassen Street. I remember grandma took me on the train to Vancouver, Washington to visit her nephew, Adolph Vraspir. I loved riding on the train. My dad worked for Schrillo Aero Tool Company and my earliest memories are the company picnics at Disneyland. Our neighbor, George Clement, worked at Ace Drill Bushing. Both were companies with Seventh-day Adventists in management and they consequently hired a lot of Adventists. Southern California has a lot of attractions besides Disneyland. There was also Knott's Berry Farm, Marineland, Griffith Park, Universal Studios, Huntington Library and the ocean beaches are just minutes away. Every summer the SDA Camp Meeting at Lynwood provided ten days of inspirational meetings and visiting with friends. I can still picture in my memory the front page of the local newspaper with an article about the Adventists and a picture of acres of canvas tents set up back-to-back in long rows. The junior tent was a big airatorium with two big fans to keep the roof up. There weren't a lot of campers and motorhomes in those days. Just a few along a fence in the far corner. The best part to me was in the basement of the cafeteria where every kind of craft was set up for the kids. Everything from leather working to plastic models was there. One year Desmond Doss came and spoke and had a book signing afterwards. A friend and I had our picture taken with him and it was printed in the local newspaper the next day. When my sister Elaine was a baby, grandma fell and broke her leg. It didn't heal properly and she went from doctor to doctor for help, but they kept telling her to stay in a wheelchair. She always suspected the doctor that set her leg in the cast didn't do it properly. As I got older, it was often my job to push her wheelchair around the church or store. We were members at the Van Nuys Seventh-day Adventist church. They had a great Pathfinder club. We got together with all the other clubs at Lynwood Academy for a big Pathfinder fair. Other times we went on campouts to Death Valley and Mt. Whitney. My mother was talked into going on the Mt. Whitney outing as a counselor as was also Esther Hilmer's mother. They each bought a couple outfits of new clothes for the occasion and someone got the bright idea that it would be easier to buy shopping carts to carry everything instead of putting it on your back in a backpack. My sister, Lana, and I were part of the Pathfinder club. My youngest sister Elaine also came with my mother. We all started hiking up the trail from Lone Pine, but the ladies with the shopping carts found it very slow going trying to get over rocks and tree roots, etc. They were soon left far behind. I've always wondered why the Pathfinder staff allowed them to do something like this. The leader of our Pathfinder club was our youth pastor, Elder Middag, who later went on to head up the entire North American Division Pathfinder department. The trail starts out fairly steep switch backing up the side of the mountain and then levels off just before arriving at a lake where the group planned to camp the first night. My sister Lana and I made it to this lake after several hours that included sheltering from a thunderstorm. When it started getting dark, and my mother and her group hadn't showed up, I decided to go back and look for them. I finally ran into them about a third of the way back down the mountain. They had finally ditched the shopping carts behind some rocks and continued carrying just their sleeping bags and some food items. It was dark by this time, so we couldn't see to continue hiking and found a place to roll out the sleeping bags. They were cheap bags and I remember this as one of the coldest nights in my life. I shivered until I was too exhausted to shiver any more. Morning finally came and we made our way up to the rest of the group. They had all had a nice supper and retired for the night without a worry about what happened to the rest of us. We ate some breakfast. All my mother's supplies were still back down the trail somewhere. My mother wasn't enjoying this camping stuff at all and after some discussion, decided to take her children and head back home. Bob Quigley, the pastor's son, asked if he could go with us. I guess he hadn't slept well either. We headed down the trail we had hiked up the day before. My mother was watching for the big rock she had hidden her shopping cart and camping supplies behind. We couldn't seem to find it. Then we noticed someone had recently built a fire next to a big rock along the trail. I found a stick and started poking around in the ashes. Soon, my mother identified a piece of unburned clothing. I kept sifting through the ashes until I found the car keys. Evidently someone coming along after my mother had been searching for something to burn to warm up and somehow discovered my mother's stuff even though she thought it was out of sight. It was a very cold night.