October 2005
Present: Margaret Scott, Robert Black, Marion Black, Jennifer Montgomery and Debbie Hammons.
What is your full name?
My name is Margaret Farlien Scott and I was born in 1916.
Your family was one of the earlier families that came here. Can you tell us what brought your parents and what year they came?
Well my grandfather came here in 1904 and he purchased a quarter of a section of a farm out here east of town. He had lived in Nebraska, and became acquainted with this area through the Lincoln Land Company. And he knew they could buy land here for twenty five dollars. And then he and his relative E.B. Wilson who was Pearl Marsh’s father, he bought a corner section so the two of them had this farmland out here and it was under the Arid land act.
Was it just sagebrush?
Yes, just sagebrush. So he went back to Nebraska and then in 1906 the railroad came through Worland and they rented a freight car and brought their cow, and their horse who had a colt and their chickens even brought a piano. At the same time he was here he’d purchased a small 80 acres near Thermopolis and that’s where they were going to live, they were going to prove up on the property out here. So they must have stayed in Worland overnight or something. They had to cross the river on a ferry. Can you imagine a piano and their horse and its colt? And they went to Thermopolis and that’s where they started out. I have letters here that my grandfather wrote in 1906 and they’re very interesting. My dad, Jacob Anderson Farlien, came in 1907. He graduated from the University of Iowa dentistry school. At first he had an office above the bank and the way the pictures are, I’m sure Worland wasn’t much of a town back then. Later he moved to Thermopolis. And I think that’s where he and mother became very well acquainted because she was living there. She taught school in Thermopolis, she was at Sunnyside at first. Her name was Edith Templin. My grandfather’s name was John Westlin Templin and he was born in 1860. My mother was born in 1887. My father was born in 1883.
What was the practice of dentistry like in those days?
He made dentures, he had his own vulcanizer. They used rubber for the gums and whatnot. One time, he said that he had pulled 49 teeth that day, and he said “one more and it would have been 50”, so he went to the movies with mom and he was called out because someone had a toothache and he pulled his 50th tooth that day. He had a pedal thing that he had to push so that he could grind your teeth, of course there was no electricity. He had it pretty rough at first. He would take his equipment and go to Cowley and spend two or three months around the Mormon area and take care of people’s teeth.
They built their house before they were married in 1910, he and my mother. I don’t know when mother came to Worland, probably about that time. I later had to sell it. It’s now across near the river, I was afraid it would be trashed but it hasn’t been.
Can you give the address of where they built their house in 1910
601 Coburn
What was Worland like around then?
I imagine it looked like any small town in those days. Kind of a rough and ready place. People didn’t have anything. Lots of them weren’t educated. Dad Worland certainly wasn’t. My father fixed his teeth and made him dentures. He had to go to the doctor later, maybe months or years, and he hadn’t taken them out of his mouth for all that time, that wad Dad Worland, so you can imagine what that was like. They didn’t have toothbrushes or mouthwash in those days so it was pretty rough.
Can you tell us about some of the other people who were around town in those days?.
Well Doc Horel, Sid Horel, was in my dad’s graduating class and he lived here and Herbert Horel was his brother and they were here. I think Herbert came in 1902. He told my dad it was wonderful hunting and he liked the mountains and he insisted my dad come here to practice so he came. He wore a boller hat and Eddie Conant was here at that time and he said “that won’t ever do in Worland Wyoming” so he took the hat and gave him a cowboy hat, so it made him feel more like Worland.
You house was just one street off main street. What was your mother’s life like as a homemaker in those days?
She had chickens and there wasn’t any sewer at that time. So I know they had an outhouse. I remember it was on the alley and at Halloween time they boys would like to push it over so one year my dad propped it up from the inside because there was a fence so the boys couldn’t push it so they were working really hard to push over the outhouse. Then there was a sewer later on but at first there was a cesspool. When I was a girl we had an indoor toilet, so that made it more pleasant. Mother did all her work and we had chickens.
What were the streets and the sidewalks like?
The sidewalks were wooden. Even when I was a girl I remember roller skating on those and falling down and skinning my knees. But later there was cement but at first it was wooden.
Tell me about going to school.
The schoolhouse was the old Emmett building and it served high school too but it didn’t when I was in school. I have a picture of the school bus, I remember riding in it just to go see my friend out in the country. We had a good school.
Did you come home for lunch?
Yes. They did eat lunch at school and I remember when you walked into the Emmett building there wasn’t much of an entry way, they had a place kind of like a bookcase where the kids would put their lunches so when you walked into the building you could smell peanut butter sandwiches and everything the kids had for lunch. I walked in one day and the case that the lunches were in fell over and I wasn’t all the way up the steps and it struck me and I got to go home but I wasn’t harmed. I remember that very well. Bertha Tharp’s, Flora’s father, was the janitor, he cleaned the floors with sawdust that had this kind of oil in it, you could smell it when you walked in the building. There was a school bell and it would ring to show that you might be tardy and it rang about 9 o’clock and if you weren’t in the building you were tardy. We had a well out in the front and it was the pump kind and we had to get our water in cups that folded, little aluminum cups. At recess we’d all take our cups out there and get a drink and have water fights. We’d play jacks and the boys played marbles and we played girls chase the boys and boys chase the girls and we played hopscotch and we played pump pump pull away. We had lots of fun.
Can you tell us about sleeping in the summer?
I can remember because our bedrooms at home were upstairs and it was beastly hot. The house that we lived in had a big wrap around porch and I would go sleep on the front porch because I couldn’t take it was so hot. I don’t know how my folks did it. No air conditioning of course. We didn’t have electric fans. My grandmother lived with us after husband died so she had to sleep upstairs too and it wasn’t easy because it was hot.
Can you talk abut refrigeration and ice boxes?
Don Babbitt’s dad had the delivery for the ice. We had cards we’d put in the window telling how much ice we required to put in our icebox. The kids would all follow behind the ice wagon so they could have a piece of ice. They worked pretty well. I think the ice man came pretty much every day.
Did your mother grow a big garden and then preserve everything or did you also go to a grocery store and buy vegetables?
Yes. We lived close to town. We lived a block to town. My dad had his office in the house and that was a good thing at the time because there wasn’t much to rent and he could build his office the way he wanted it. You could get an awful lot of groceries for five dollars, meat and everything. Mother had a garden, I don’t remember her having much of a vegetable garden. Mr. Marsh had a horse drawn wagon and he would carry his vegetables. He had his own special customers. He’d stop and mother would send me out to get cucumbers or beans or something. She’d give me the money and Mr. Marsh would take it and say “how much change do you think you should get for that much money?” That was kind of fun.
Do you remember when you first got telephones.
I know my dad had a telephone in his office. We didn’t have one in the living part of the house. He was his own office girl. He didn’t have anyone to help him. He did all his own office work. When he became mayor, he was elected on a write in vote, and they first oiled the streets. Dad was mayor and the ladies on the particular street that they oiled just a block just to get an idea of how it work. They got together and they called him, and they knew he had an office phone you know, one after the other would call and say “why did you use our street to put oil on” that was one of the thing that a mayor had to contend with in those days you know. But I can remember a telephone but it was in the office. Mother and I, if we had to make a phone call would go in the office. It wasn’t that they didn’t have two telephones in homes at that time. We didn’t have it in our house until later.
When your grandfather came in 1904, can you remember any stories about Worland from then?
I can remember them telling about the fire that consumed the northern part of main street. I have a letter that my grandfather wrote in 1906 when they lived in Thermopolis on the Owl Creek, it was the lower Owl Creek, so my mother taught at Lucerne and it was called the Sunnyside school. She was eighteen or nineteen and she was the first teacher. She had kids that were bigger than she was, she wasn’t very big.
Worland was growing quite a bit were you aware of that as a child?
The schools, you could tell, there were more students. They finally built a nice high school. I think that was in the 20’s.
You said that you had a friend that lived in the country. Was a difference between the kids in town and the kids in the country?
It wasn’t a good thing because the children who’s folks were the Volga Germans, they had a B class and an A class, which was kind of discriminating. They had the B class because the kids were out helping in the beet fields so the A class was more or less the town kids and B class were the farm kids. That really was a discriminating thing, but you can understand why because the teachers couldn’t handle it. So that was one of the things that wasn’t too good but something that couldn’t be avoided. I entered high school in 1929 and the high school itself was really, outside of the churches, was the nucleus for everything that went on in town. Mrs. Ferry was a wonderful teacher and her husband taught history. She made everyone who had the least bit of talent so something so they had wonderful shows and everyone participated and it was a big deal in those days because they’d have a corn show and they had dinner beforehand and the churches were probably the main cooks and bottle washers. We had good times.
So for the Corn Show the whole town joined in?
They had a ballet class, ballet girls, and I was one of the ballet girls. They would have students who would sing songs. I have one of the programs.
In Wyoming, the Depression hit in the 20’s so when people came to your father, how did they pay him?
With vegetables. I’m using a quilt on my bed right now that some lady paid her bill with this quilt that she made. I’m still using it and every time I use it I think of Mrs. Jack Gladman. That’s how they paid their bills, chickens, meat, anything they could use. And my dad was glad to get it.
Special occasions, you mentioned churches. Were there very many churches in Worland in those days?
There was a Baptist church and a Methodist church and a catholic church. There weren’t many Catholics at that time and there was a Lutheran church over here that’s still used by the Greeks. They were the center too of activity. I know the Methodist church had a basement and they had dinners for the club meetings and the men had an alfalfa club and there wasn’t an Elks club at that time. We girls, when we were in high school, would go and help, and serve tables.
What about Saturday night? Can you describe that?
That was quite a deal. Everyone went to town on Saturday night. If people didn’t want to do anything else they sat in their car and watched people walk on the sidewalks. And maybe they know somebody and they’d wave and you’d go over and talk to them or something. That was the big deal. People from the farms would come in and that was our entertainment. Of course there was the movie theater too, the old Elk Theater. We had movies for ten cents admission and at Saturday afternoon they would have a matinee. We just thought that was great to go to those movies. They would continue. They’d have a movie and they’d stop it in a certain spot and next week you’d have to come back and catch the rest of the movie. So they kept their audience going that way.
Did your family take any trips and what were the roads like? What was your vehicle like?
It was a Studebaker and then he had a Hudson. My dad liked a nice car. So we had a car. He had his friend from Iowa and his wife and the four of them went to Yellowstone Park. I was about three years old at the time. They talked about the yellow busses with the foreign people in the park that probably came from Cody. I have pictures of them when they were in that particular era and I don’t remember what kind of car it was at that time but dad had a large touring car, they called it, and they were open. Later, they had not the same type, but they had isinglass. That you’d put on with little thumbtacks you could use to put the isinglass on the sides to keep it a little warmer and keep the wind out. We’d have a buffalo robe or something to put on our laps. We didn’t go out much in the winter time but we did go out in the car. Dad would drain the radiator in the winter time and have to fill the radiator if we went anywhere they next morning. It was freezing, we didn’t have a garage that had a heater.
Do you remember traveling to Thermopolis? How long did that take?
For them it would take most of the day but when we’d go it would take a little more than an hour. When a bunch of us kids would go to the Scotch Plunge, it didn’t cost anything you didn’t have to go into Thermopolis and pay a quarter to go to the plunge. You could go in there for nothing. A bunch of us kids would go to Thermopolis to have fun. We’d go up to the mountains and the Colbys had four boys and they had a bug. We kids called it a bug. It was an old rattletrap but it ran. We’d go back into the hills and climb and find rocks, and the boys would take boys and arrows and shoot the rabbits which we thought was terrible, the girls did. We had lots of fun. One time we went to West Lake and at that time the roads were really boulders and this old bug would go this way and that. We didn’t fish but we had such a good time.
There were some years where we had big crops but then dry weather that hit. Do you have any recollection of people talking about it being dry.
My grandmother lived on the farm after my grandfather died. She rented it out to Earl Bower and he raised hay mostly and I guess some beets. In those days those things didn’t mean much to me.
One of the things they used for farming was canals. Tell me about canals in Worland.
They were fun. That’s where we all learned how to swim. It’s moved from the high school but it was near the high school. The upper class boys would throw the freshman boys in for fun I guess. Girls didn’t participate in that. We did learn how to swim in it and there were children who drowned in it.
Tell me about some of your friends that you played with, some of your dear childhood friends.
One of my dear friends, Josephine Snider, her dad delivered the mail. When they first lived in town they lived a block from us and Josephine and I were friends all through school and later on. I had a lot of friends but I can’t think of names.
How old did you have to be, in your family, before you could go out with a boy?
I never did date very much in high school.
You were probably in school during the depression.
Most people didn’t have money. I was lucky that my folks could send me to college. I didn’t have to work at all. All four of my kids worked at university, they all worked to help pay their way.
Your great grandkids might watch this someday, what would you like them to remember about what you saw back when you were a young person?
I remember going to a movie and it was Our Gang comedy. I wasn’t very old at the time. A little black boy was in the movie and he was eating candy. The proprietor of the store scolded him for taking a piece of candy and he said, “but over here it says the Lord helps those who help themselves.” And I still use that as something to stand by.
Do you remember the dance hall?
It was behind the bank, the Pinnacle Bank. It had a canvas roof. I didn’t dance or anything and our house was kitty corner and so I could hear the kids and everything at the dance hall, and the music and the girls when I went to school the girls were talking about the fun they had and I didn’t go.
You went to school in the Emmett Building?
They had basketball in the old Emmett Building in the old basement. It was a small room and the people who went to observe it would sit and there wasn’t any room for the fellas to play basketball because everyone wanted to go to see the game.