Childhood in Sandpoint filled with chores, family

(Today I want to share with you a portion of the interview done with Bud Moon, in his own words, during the making of the “Sandpoint Centennial” movie. It gives us a picture of earlier Sandpoint and the people who made it what it is today.)

“My name is Lawrence Gilman Moon III. I am better known as Bud Moon. No one ever knew my name; the teachers didn’t even know my name. Pat McManus hung the nickname of “Fats Moon” on me. I was born in Sandpoint on March 19, 1926, at Miss Finney’s Lying-in Hospital.

“My mother’s name was Hazel Rice Moon and my dad’s name was Lawrence Gilman Moon Jr. I have two sisters and they are named Katy and Charlotte.

“My grandparents came from Wisconsin in 1902 and stayed overnight at the Hope Hotel. The railroad bridge had not been built across the lake from Sandpoint and my dad remembered standing in a train car that had been put on car barges.

“The barges were taken down the lake to Fry Creek and then the cars were put back on the train tracks and on to Spokane.

“My mother and father both worked at the funeral home and the three little Moon kids grew up in the back room.

“Our funeral home was then located at 420 N. Third Ave.; today, a parking lot for the hospital is located in that spot. It had a lot of fir trees and when we were kids we used to decorate the trees with Christmas lights.

“Joanne and Esther Pennington lived nearby and they would always cross the street because they didn’t like to walk by the mortuary at night.

“Before I started to school, I recall that the

See GUNTER, Page 3

GUNTER

Continued from Page 1

Humbird Mill was running. When I was a little preschooler, my job was to go out on the front porch every morning and bring in the milk bottles.

“My father was a mortician and I recall him making cedar caskets for people and my mother would line them with muslin from Penney’s. People back then did not have a lot of money and he made these caskets for a lot of people. He would barter for saw logs and things like that, for our winter wood.

“When we lived at 824 Church St., we had a cow — Daisy the cow. We shared milk with some of the neighborhood families. My father would come home from work and he would milk the cow.

“If he didn’t make it home to milk we had a neighbor who didn’t have a job and he would do the milking; we would split the milk with him.

“At that time, I was in charge of 12 chickens. My job was to collect the eggs and when I got a bicycle I had to go down to the feed store and get five pounds of wheat every few days.

“Later on, if there were any excess eggs left over I would sell them to the Elks Club. I usually sold a dozen a week to the Elks at 35 cents a dozen.

“When I was the manager of the basketball team all the guys called me ‘Doc.’ I was the trainer and the ankle wrapper.

“During high school I had a little out board motor and a small tin boat. In the summer time, I worked from four in the afternoon to midnight at a filling station.

“At midnight, I had to go across the lake into Bottle Bay. My mother used to say that she stayed awake until she heard the little putt-putt-putt of my boat and then she would go to sleep.

“I started in Farmin School, where the bank is, and my first grade teacher was Nell K. Irion and Charlie Stidwell was the young principal, at that time.

“Teachers were allowed to do things differently back then. I remember Mamie Bandy, the eighth-grade teacher, caught a kid chewing gum and she made him spit it out and she then took it and rubbed it all in his hair. That kid never chewed gum in school after that.”

To be continued.