VALERIA DEAVER LAMB-PILGREEN
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She described their first house in Riverview, west of Pasco, as sitting on a long-neglected piece of ground on which all vegetation had been permitted to die. “We didn’t worry much about air conditioning in those days,” she wrote. “Most of those old houses were self-air conditioned the year round, as even in the best of them there were plenty of cracks for air circulation… With wood-burning stoves and piles of driftwood and wood chips for fuel, it was a steady job after school hauling in three or four tubs full of chips, and dragging out two tubs of ashes. The bathroom if that is what you would call the structure some hundred feet from the house, was anything but cozy in winter,” she continued.
She recalls that “Cream Separators” was a nasty phrase to many girls who had to wash them twice a day, using water that had to be carried in from a well and heated on the back of the stove, which was also necessary on washday.
“I felt fortunate that I went to the size high school that Pasco had in the 1930’s. What a good selection of subjects, and excellent, dedicated teachers,” she wrote. “How lucky we were to have the Grange to provide clean entertainment, and the Pasco schools to attend. We had the advantage of living on the farm and yet attending the city schools, giving us the benefits of both types of society. I recall that a large percentage of the honor students came from the rural area. Surely, our life style, which in these days might be considered ‘economically deprived,’ was not such a bad thing after all,” she continued.
Mrs. Pilgreen recalls how she earned her first money at the age of 11, picking strawberries on the Ed Clemens farm. She worked a week and had earned six dollars and thirty-two cents, she remembers, and when Mr. Clemens paid her with six silver dollars and some small coins she looked so disappointed that he asked her what the trouble was.“ I told him I did not want that kind of money. I wanted a check! Ed laughed and wrote the check for me, and I’ll never forget going to the bank to cash it. Lyle Stringham, the banker, handled that big transaction. Many times, after I had grown up, he would laugh and tell me, and anyone with me, about the time he cashed my first big check.”
“Between windstorms, cold spells, and hot weather, life never had a dull moment,” Valeria wrote. “One day, after carrying about 15 pails of water from the well to the house, a distance of about 100 feet, I did a washing. After I had all of my clothes out on the line, a typical Pasco windstorm came up and blew down my clothes line. Just about that time, Virgil Lamb came by and saw my plight. He made me a new clothes line, saying that this one would not blow down. Now I recognized a good thing when I saw it, and I decided that if a young man could build a clothes line that would hold up in Pasco winds, I had better grab him for a husband.” Which she did.
In her later article, “Wind, Water and Will Power,” she gave her definition of “running water,” which during her first five years of married life, (from 1936 to 1941), consisted of grabbing two galvanized pails, dashing 130 feet to the well, attaching a rope on the pulley, and drawing the water from a sixty-foot well, and hurrying back to the house to fill a tub for washing, canning, or the everyday household chores.”
When they moved to a new farm they bought an old black nickel-plate trimmed cook stove for $15, her first “very own” stove. She said that each time she started the fire she was reminded of the then popular story, “The Egg and I.” Though the stove was old, it was a good one, and the temperature gauge on the oven really worked; most of them did not, she wrote. Yes, I was a happy bride showing off that old secondhand stove that was probably twice as old as I was at the time, she added.
Again they had “running water,” at this new place, so they decided to dig their own well, with Valeria cranking up the dirt that her husband, Virgil, had dug from the bottom of the well. For this she used a windlass, and, after mixing cement in a coal scuttle, she lowered it down into the well to be used in making a casing.
Later, she and her husband moved to another farm, also with “running water," but this time four times as far away from the house, so they started digging another well evenings after Virgil came home form work. “In the meantime I am sure that ‘someone up there’ was watching over us in that well-digging process, as we did not have a cave-in, nor did any debris fall on the energetic digger at the bottom of the well.”
