Family taught Turnbull the meaning of work

(It was my intention to conclude the interviews with Harp Turnbull last week. I received calls telling me that I had not said enough about Harp's mother and that I had totally omitted a subject dear to the heart of anyone living in Sagle - baseball. Today, Harp shares in his unique way and in his own words, with some editing due to space limitations, abaaout two things he dearly loved, his mother and family, and the Sagle Sourdoughs.)

Question: Harp, it sounds as if your family taught you what the word "work" means - is that right?  

Harp: Those people had it in their walk of life - they had it tough. I mean, it was hard going when they moved in here. It had to be but I heard no complaint on it. I'll tell you something about my dad. His first child, my sister, was born in 1890 and he was out hacking ties and trying to making their living.

He said that he never saw his baby daughter except on Sunday in day light until she was three years old. That's the way they worked - up and out and into the woods at daylight before the baby was up - back in after dark after the baby was in bed - never seeing her in day light except right when she was first born.

I had this record from Oliver Turnbull that was just memories he had put together of the day-by-day work they did. The way he described it - those peopled worked. There's an excerpt in there where Tom and I, or Fred and I, split five hundred cedar posts a day. Tom and Dad hauled four hundred and ninety posts from up on the place down to Sagle and if you boys ever took a mauling wedge, and a cross cut saw, and made five hundred posts, you'd know somebody was losing some sweat. My God! A man out hacking ties at day light and in after dark, you know they worked, Bob. They had to and they got nothing for it. I have a cedar pole list down in the basement in a little trunk and the highest priced pole on it is ninety cents on board car at Pettit Spur. Now, you can't look at a cedar pole, forty or fifty foot pole, for ninety cents. They had to go out and make those poles, peel em, haul em down there to Pettit Spur, down here at Westmond, and load it on board a car for ninety cents.

Question: Harp, how about your mother - what kind of work did the women do?

Harp: My mother was born in 1873 in Sweet Home or in that Willamette Valley. down in Sweet Home, Oregon. Her father, Nathan Williams, was a horse trader, and he had moved over around Cheney probably in the eighteen seventies. My mother told me that the years that they were there they had never seen a deer in the area that they lived in.

She told me that they were actually starving at that time. They needed food but her father was laying there sick in bed. A deer came walking by and her mother got the old muzzle load rifle for him. He was not a hunter but she propped the old man up in bed and he shot the deer and that's the only deer that they ever saw. You didn't want to try to tell my mother that there wasn't a God. They lived it rough.

My mother could wield an ax as good as any lumberjack. She did her work here. She built a house and she had her flowers. I've seen that woman go down in the pasture and chop wood. We didn't have chain saws - we used cross cuts and an ax. She'd go down and chop wood, come home and put the sourdough biscuits in the warming oven to rise for dinner, come out and work in her flower garden till the biscuits had risen, go back in and cook dinner. Good food? You're damned right it was good food! She was a wonderful person and she worked herself to death. (Harp became very emotional when talking about his mother and said) I don't like to make a fool of myself - this is a sentimental place for me.

Question; Will you tell us about Turnbull Field?

Harp: Baseball. Baseball. Sagle was a baseball town from the time that those people started moving in here. My father told me the reason it was called Turnbull Field was that the first baseball game was played right on this meadow. This was way back in the early nineteen hundreds. Then, those boys were great enthusiasts and they loved to play baseball. They were the Sourdoughs. So, those boys started building diamonds. They had one down at Dufort. They had one over on the old Craig place. They were working on a baseball diamond down by Shepherd Lake.

The Turnbull boys got together and bought ten acres down there where the school sits and built their diamond which has been the baseball diamond ever since - so it is now known as Turnbull Field. Then the boys donated the land that the schoolhouse is on out of that ten acres and that is where the schoolhouse is now. Incidentally, talking about my mother, she made two suits, baseball suits, for the old Sourdoughs and then the Sagle team. She made both sets of baseball uniforms for those teams by hand. Mother got sick before she got the Sagle uniforms lettered and Mrs. Fry put the letters on and Mom fell out with her because she put the letters on wrong. But that's the way it goes - that's the way you build a country.