Howdy everyone! I have been watching the conversation about the old things people remember and have concluded that a lot of you had a much different life than I did growing up. We lived in a small town in Montana where the main industries were ranching and the railroad. My Grandfather was a conductor on the Milwaukee Road RR, and the Northern Pacific line came in to our town, too. The Northern Pacific had a roundhouse about a block away from my Grandfather's store that my Grandmother ran because Grandpa was often out of town on a train, as conductors had to travel a lot. It was the nature of their jobs. We lived at the edge of town,,,Across the tracks in an area known as WOPTOWN, named in honor of all the immigrants that settled there. My grandfather was from Norway, so he fit in there very well. This town really did have distinct sections of town divided by the railroads. Because of the lack of riches in our household and the households of all my friends, we were forced to make a lot of our toys. This was a very entertaining, educational, and enjoyable endevor that took up a lot of our spare time, until we discovered girls, of course! We would scour the alleys and railroads for any item that would be of use to us. A piece of metal strapping with holes in it would make a great whistle, or scraps of lumber could make swords or shields. We made rocket launchers with scraps of pipe and a little wood, then fired our bottle rockets very accurately with them. Many cars, trucks, and trains got blasted with our bottle rockets. I preferred the type that exploded at the end of their flight. Zebra and Black Cats were the best. We collected rocks and fossils and did a lot of fishing and hiking. We hung around the lapidary shops in town and learned to cut agate and make jewelry from our treasures. I still have cutting equipment I acquired many years later. (Interestingly enough, Vanessa, my wife, graduated from gem-cutting school nearly 3 decades after I saw my first agate cut!) We did have a television, though. I still remember the Froggie-doo show, Captain Kangaroo, afternoon matinees, Gunsmoke, Car54, The Second Hundred Years, the Munsters, 77 Sunset Strip, and a zillion other shows. We didn't see many evening shows in the summer time, though, because my Father ran a drive-in theater. The Sunset Drive-in. This was just outside of town then, but in later years became prime property because it was at the junction of two highways. I went by the old site 2 years ago and the rusted old sign is still there saying "Sunset" and an arrow pointing toward where it once was. The grandest gift of all, when I was a child, was my first BB gun. We were very close friends and it traveled many miles with me until I was old enough to have a real rifle. All my friends were about 8 or 9 when they got their first rifles, but my Father didn't hunt so I was a little older when I got my first one. My buddies all agreed that if we could come up with the money to buy bullets, we would all share their rifles. We collected pop bottles, scrap metal, shoveled snow, cut yards, ran errands, cleaned up the rodeo grounds, sold Grit newspapers, hunted agates to sell to lapidaries,and did almost anything to make money for bullets. Since my family had 30 acres across the river from town, and another section (640 acres) farther out of town, we did a lot of our shooting on our place. It was a fair trade, a place to shoot in trade for something to shoot with. We never shot any livestock or anyone, and never had any sort of accident with our guns. We had been taught to respect them, and looking back, I think we were probably more mature at that young age than a lot of adults are now in the handling of our guns and other events in our lives. We were tough and determined. One of the best places to fish was at Fort Keough. The Yellowstone was slow and deep on it's south bank at this place. There was an island nearby that we could get to in the summer that flooded in the springtime. I never saw a snake on that island and think they all drownded in the spring floods. I remember seeing huge blocks of ice left over from the spring floods. Some of them were as large as our house!. The Yellowstone would freeze solid or nearly solid in the winter when the temperatures were 40 or 50 below zero, then when the warm spring winds thawed the snow and ice, the river would rise and the ice would break apart, then jam up just north of town, between our place where we kept our horses, and town. The ice jams were quite a sight. Blocks of ice would float and tumble and churn, crashing into each other and forcing other sheets to be thrust up into the air until they broke or gravity took charge and caused them to come splashing down into the slowly swirling mess. We spent many days of our youth watching the ice flowing and jamming up. When the ice jammed, it caused flooding. There was a dike built around the river-side of town that occasionally was flooded over. City and county officials would monitor the ice to advise people when to evacuate if necessary. We kids really were thrilled when a lumber yard was flooded for we knew that in the coming summer we would have plenty of lumber for our tree houses and forts. All we had to do was collect if from in the trees and backwashes downstream. One time, the local officials feared a really bad flood because of a heavy snowfall that winter. They calculated where the ice needed to be broken up and set a tremendous charge of explosives in a small crater they chipped into the ice. When they set the charge off, the shock waves broke every window for several blocks that faced the river. A few years later, they were confronted with the same problem of heavy ice and snowfall and asked for assistance from the air force. The air force calculated where the worst part of the ice jam would be and notified the locals that they would just fly over and drop one little bomb on the ice and end the problem. After the fiasco with the explosives a few years earlier, all the residents taped windows and borded windows and sent their dogs and children across town fearing the worst from this bombing. (That is, the children that weren't with hiding up on a hilltop across the river watching!) A big bomber came flying up the river with it's giant engines roaring, then swooped down low, lower than the hilltops to the north of town, and dropped it's payload precisely on target. The bomb hit the ice, broke through, and made a throaty "Whump" sound, not even loud enough to make you cover your ears. The ice rose up around where the bomb struck and when it settled down, the jam was broken. And the river ran free. In the summer, at the drive-in we watched the northern lights glitter on the horizon to the north and layed on the ground and stared in awe at the starry heavens above us. At one time, some of the guys could name all the constellations. They said there were 88 of them, but I couldn't ever identify that many. I don't even think we could see that many from Montana, but we tried. We would lay on the ground behind the screen where it was really dark and look for shooting stars or on rare occasions we thought we could see a Sputnik or Telstar, but never knew for sure if we did. Not all life was play. We had to tend to our horses no matter what the weather. We had to walk to school in the winter. School didn't close until it was 40 below zero in Montana. We had to shovel snow and break ice all winter. I learned to drive a truck at an age of about 9 to feed cattle at a round-up. ( Since I was driving in a circle, nothing could really go wrong, but I thought of myself as a man after that!) We knew of slaughter houses and train wrecks and the horrors that could befall someone who didn't think before acting. Life was really tough, compared to today, but I go back as often as I can, camp out in the mountains, and look at the stars. Stan Magnesen Yelowstone@aol.com