I was going to use another photo, thinking there’d been enough of them featuring me, me, me. But hey! Tomorrow’s my birthday, and , so if ever there was an appropriate time for one more photo of me as a child, this was it.
I’m guessing I’m four in this photo and that would make the year 1959. The house in the background is the ranch hand’s home on my uncle’s ranch, the P Lazy P, in Gannet, Idaho. We lived there while my dad helped my uncle with the ranch work and my mother cooked for the crew in the big kitchen of the beautiful log ranch house my uncle built by himself.
I amused myself outdoors while my mother worked indoors. There were always animals around—dogs, kittens, chickens—and people working. Sometimes I helped collect eggs, and sometimes I hung on the outside of the corral and watched the horse training or the calf branding. Another thing that fascinated me was the artesian well right outside the fenced-in yard, which gushed water from a 4 inch pipe and made a little stream that ran out into the field.
My family continued to go to the ranch in the summer whenever we could. My dad had been a cowboy, so he loved being there during round up, and my mother loved visiting all her relatives who lived nearby. The ranch was only twenty miles from the Sun Valley ski area, and eventually the area became a place for the rich and famous to have a vacation home. It became more and more difficult to keep cattle on the open range, so my uncle sold the ranch to someone with Hollywood connections and he moved further west to the Wallowa area of Oregon.