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.