Selby, South Dakota 1925-2001

The Friendly Cook

June 10, 2006

SELBY, SOUTH DAKOTA 1925- 2001

My first trip to Selby ( from NJ) , I’m told, was on the Nickel Plate Railroad, with my mother, when I was 5. All I remember of it is delicate glass bowls on the tables in the dining car, that I thought were to drink from, and the height of the steps when it was time to get off. Later I learned what an event it was for the Flyer to stop at Selby. It meant the depot agent had hung out the red flag just for us. The engineer could see the flag across the flat prairie enough miles ahead to start stopping.

This, in 1925, would have been my mother’s first trip home since she had left in 1915 to be married in Elmira, NY and honeymoon in Watkins Glen, to settle in a New York City apartment, ( #10 Arden St., far uptown, gone now), have my brother and another boy who breathed once and died, nurse my father through the 1918 flu, have me, move to Kearny and Arlington, keep me alive through pneumonia and surgery for a lung drain at age 2, and move further out to Mountain Lakes.

All the subsequent trips were in one Hudson or another, with mother driving. My father said Hudson put the money into good engines, not a fancy body. Our first car was a Chalmers, then an Essex, then Hudsons. My father and my brother rebuilt the last Essex, in our cellar, which is why I know what a drive shaft looks like and how to step over one. Then they drove it to Selby for Grandpa Powell to use on the farm. When it stopped moving he used it as a stationary power source for various tools. My father took a movie of the trip, consisting of one garage after another. After WWII he branched out to Packard and Buick and Mercedes, but we still heard about the virtues of the Hudson.

Grandpa and Grandma had homesteaded three quarter sections, The one room school house was built on their land and Grandma was the teacher, There were 8 students in mother’s 8th grade graduation class, one of whom was the first of the two Governor Micklesons. Since there was no high school in Selby, mother was sent to Huron (SD) Academy for high school and the start of college. All I heard about that was my father’s comment, “Your mother walked in to class and that was it.” They were married 10 years later, after he finished 6 years at Huron and 4 years at Cornell. She added a year at Oberlin and a year at Cornell to her years at Huron, then worked in the courthouse until it was time to go east alone for the wedding.

Grandpa gave up full time farming and the battle with grasshopppers, drought, dust storms and low prices. He moved the family to town and became the county clerk and ran an abstract business, found a tenant farmer, and spent all his weekends on the farm. He built the first house in town with indoor plumbing. Four bedrooms, two parlors, immense kitchen, a storm cellar for tornados, which got used, Despite the indoor plumbing, when anyone wanted a marvelous bath, they pumped water from the cistern in the back yard, heated it on the kitchen stove, carried it upstairs and dumped it into the tub. I don’t know how often they did this, but they did it once for me and the water felt like whipped cream, not that I have ever bathed in whipped cream -----One learned that a cistern holds rain water and a well extracts water from the earth, and that a pump needs to be primed.

The trips to Selby blend together. On one I learned to read music. There was a Hollis Dann school song book on the piano my mother had played. I interrupted one of her long catch up talks with her mother, pointed to a song and asked how to play it. She pointed to a note and said ,”Oh- that’s middle C . Go figure it out.” There was old oversize sheet music there- I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier, For Me and My Gal… and mother’s music from her year at Oberlin - lots of arpeggios and flowery parlor music. I read a lot of old books with fine print the summer before I got my first glasses and the news that I was not to read anything except required school work, which led to majoring and minoring in English so lots of books would be required.

I had close friends there. Iris Campbell’s mother made the greatest doughnuts possible, and Iris and I pulled them around town to deliver, in a wooden coaster wagon. There is no use in asking for a recipe for raised doughnuts made by an expert. You just enjoy them. One year I took Iris some slacks and a network shirt, She took one look and said ,”Put those away and don’t let my mother see them.” Florence and her little sister, Audrey, had a grandfather who made stilts for them and for me, although I think I did not take any home to show my mother. To visit Florence I always went down the alley, because the action was in the back yard, The Clarks had a white picket fence along the alley that we used for help getting balanced on the stilts. Our grandfather whittled forks and spoons for us but most of all, popguns. He pushed the pulp out of a straight piece of willow, then whittled a plunger to fit inside precisely. We made balls of wet paper, pushed one to the end of the gun, then put in a second one, jammed the plunger home and shot the first one out far. Very clear demo of air pressure.

“Town” consisted of very wide east-west streets, with sidewalks, two north and two south of and parallel to, Main St, which was even wider, built for wagons coming in from the surrounding farms. An alley ran between each two streets. A lot of town people kept a cow, and someone came along the alley and took each cow out of her stable, out to pasture. This must have been only on the earliest visits. There were, I think, four north- south streets. From the high school at the east end of town you could see along Main Street to the depot at the west end, without the slightest rise. Used to a town where there was almost no flat space even big enough for a croquet game, I was impressed with that view. Beyond the last street in each direction you were suddenly on the prairie. The wind whistled around the school building so wildly that at first I believed the glee club was practicing every day.

The morning after one arrival, Mr, Noteboom, editor of the Walworth County Record, interviewed us as we sat on Grandma’s back stoop. He told me that the population of Selby was 300, but now that we had arrived it was 303. My brother must have come along that time. We picked choke cherries for jam - no use for a recipe for that either, unless you have choke cherries. We climbed out a window onto the porch roof and got sent to our rooms. It seemed to me that everyone in town cleaned house all morning and sat on a porch all afternoon, or visited another porch, sewing quilt patches or darning. The porches were screened against monster mosquitoes, If there was water, some was splashed onto the front sidewalk to fight the heat. If, heaven be praised, it rained, we were allowed to go barefoot and play in the muddy gutters. Prairie mud is different from New Jersey mud - about the texture of chocolate pudding - no stones. If we wanted to play hopscotch we asked our mothers for big buttons to toss instead.
For amusement, we could go down (?) to the depot and watch the Flyer go by. One summer there was a Chatauqua lecture tent, which I went to a lot but remember not one message. We took picnics a few miles out of town to Lake Hiddenwood, where later I found an established campground and introduced the youngest to her first natural water. But what I recall from the early visits is running barefoot over cactus. Small, sneaky, ground cover cactus. Epworth League at church was fun. One summer Grandma scheduled chicks to hatch soon after I arrived. It was entertainment to me to be sent to carry a box of eggs two blocks to the general store and trade for thread or whatever Grandma needed. It was pure delight in the evening to hear piano music from the Mickleson house a block away. Ramona was the favorite song . One special night I was invited to a party at the edge of town by a girl whose parents had come from Russia. I was awed to meet someone from another country, but from Russia! - might as well have been the moon. My grandmother pronounced it Roosha. (The girls at the party were awed to meet me, someone “from East” and were positive that this meant New York City and that I was rich.) The father took out a flute and opened a big black book, full of hand written music. That night I was glad I had been more interested in reading new music than in serious practice, because I could sight read whatever he chose to play. I must have had more nerve then than I have now. I have no memory of what we played, just the pleasure.

Nobody had a bike or a scooter. I never heard of or saw any toys.. Grandpa had a radio but it seemed to be exclusively his. Saturday afternoons there were movies at the Opera House- serial westerns, with popcorn. We waited when the reel had to be changed, but not quietly. Grandpa died at 85 in 1934 without ever having seen a movie. My brother took me once to the very small, very forbidden pool room down some steps under the hotel, or maybe it was the Opera House - the big excitement that night was one of the “big girls” kicking high enough to hit the single, unshaded light bulb that hung from a single wire. My brother and I were strangely familiar with pool tables. My father had bought the sections of a full size Brunswick table, paid a taxi driver to bring it a long way, and installed it in our attic, where there was never quite enough room to bring the stick back as far as we wanted. We played a lot, but with my father we had to play a game he called Cowboy with the cue ball and only three others, spotted equidistant along the table. Every shot had to be a carom. Direct shots to the pocket were errors. So my brother was not only the good looking new boy in town but a whiz in the pool room.

One summer we drove Grandma and Grandpa beyond Selby west to pick up rocks for a rock garden, probably at the edge of the Black Hills. Grandma built the only rock garden in town, at the front corner of her yard, where it got a lot of attention. Her gardens were news. She knew the Latin names for everything she planted. She also taught embroidery, knitted complex patterns, made quilts with tiny stitches and precise patchwork. Her standard of craftsmanship was on a wooden plaque inside a closet door, a verse from The Builders by Longfellow: “Think not because no man sees, such things shall remain unseen” …. Another one said “ Count that day lost whose low descending sun Sees from thy hand no worthy action done.”

When I had just started ninth grade, we drove out again. I stayed in Selby to live with Grandpa for 6 weeks, and go to school, while Mother drove Grandma to Minneapolis for cataract surgery, in the days of lying still with sand bags around your head while the eyes healed. Neighbors brought casseroles for grandpa and me and I guess the whole town looked after us. The only specific food I remember from all those trips is creamed pheasant, with buckshot in it here and there.

The last time I saw Selby my brother and I were settling our inheritance and sale of the farm land. The firstborn came along for the ride and wandered along Main Street while we signed things. She reported in amazement, “Strangers said hello to me!” That sums up Selby for me, all the times I visited.