Here are some stories, all true to the best of my knowledge, that we have heard at various times, mostly at family gatherings of one sort or another. Many times this was when we were all together around the table at dinner time.
This is mostly my recollection of the event. Others may vary.
When I was young, around 4 or 5 maybe, we were on a vacation to Montana and stopped at (my) Grandma and Grandpa (Charles and Lena) Foltz'es ranch. I don't remember exactly how I picked up on this, but somehow I followed Grandpa out toward the chicken coup, asking him repeatedly "Are you going to kill the chicken? Are you going to kill the chicken? Are you going to kill the chicken?" He got a little exasperated before we got there, turned around to me and said "YES, I'm going to kill the chicken!" He turned back and walked into the little fenced area around the coup, leaving me quieter and outside the fence.
I watched while he managed to corner the chicken that he wanted and carried it to a chopping block inside the fence. With his back to me, blocking the actual event, he decapitated the chicken with a small hand ax and then I saw first-hand how fruitless and funny looking a chicken is when they run around with their head cut off. The excitement ended quickly and I found something else to do for a while.
Later on, I walked in through the back door of the house and saw Grandma plucking the feathers while I was wondering why it was taking so long when I was getting hungry. I don't really remember dinner but we did eventually eat. In retrospect, this little episode was probably why bone-in or whole chicken was not one of my favorites for many years. City kid.
One year when we were vacationing in Montana, we stopped by to see Uncle Jess. At this point, I don't remember exactly who all was there.
For some reason, it was decided that we should all go to a good steak restaurant, I think Uncle Jess may have wanted to treat us. So we drove for an hour or so to somewhere in Wyoming to a good restaurant to get some good steaks.
After our big group all got seated, the waitress came around taking orders and everybody ordered a good steak dinner and something to drink - until she got to me. I ordered liver and onions and everybody looked at me like I was an alien or had an extra nose on my face. I think my reasoning was that if they had good steak, they probably had good liver too and liver was something I didn't get very often, not that steak was a common thing.
When the food came, everybody dug in and ate with no mention, that I recall, of my odd choice. I still like liver and onions although I prefer liver and bacon if it's available. I like steak too but don't get either one very often.
This story is a little newer than many of the others. My Dad was the current geneologist of the family and at one time received some uncorroborated information that one of the great-...-great grandfathers married a full blooded Cherokee Indian woman. By Dad's calculation, this makes him 1/64th part Cherokee and therefore makes me and my siblings 1/128th part Cherokee.
My nephew, after hearing this, was telling it to his kids but couldn't remember what the tribe was. He said "but it's only a smidge anyway." His lovely blond daughter, after reflecting for a moment, asked "so we're part of the Smidge Tribe?" He and his wife immediately picked up on this, and started adding a few embellishing details about the Smidge Tribe, such as: They were a very close tribe, and put up their teepees just a smidge apart.
Dad tells a lot of jokes or funny stories just for fun. I am guilty of this too (just ask my kids). We have all heard many of them a number of times and can usually recognize the "old favorites" after the first few words.
When we were a little older but some of us were still living at home, Dad (or someone?) once told this joke at the dinner table:
The men in a prison had a joke book with each of the jokes numbered. They had heard these jokes so many times that they resorted to telling jokes by number. Everyone there laughed hilariously when someone said a number. A new prisoner called out a number and no one laughed. He asked why not and a long time inmate replied "Some guys can tell a joke and some can't.
One of us smart-aleck kids spoke up and said that Dad's funny stories should be numbered and that way we could just say the number and everyone would recall the story and laugh, thus saving a lot of time. We (Dad included) actually did this for a while and it was fun. Since the circumstances of whatever was going on usually pointed out which story was appropriate, we could just say any number and everyone would know the right story. I don't think there was ever actually a numbered list.
Here are some of the favorites: 123, 86, 42 and who could forget 64!
I think that Aunt Martha was the subject of this lesson. She can be what some people would call a little high-strung. Apparently she wanted to learn to drive and Uncle Bernard and Dad thought that this would be a good opportunity for some fun. They drove Martha in Dad's Model A Ford coupe down across the river to a dirt road used mostly for hauling hay. It wandered around several large cottonwood trees between the corral and fields. So Uncle Bernard and Dad rigged up the old Ford car with a string tied to the throttle under the hood that came back to the rumble seat where they were sitting. Martha was in the driver's seat and they started down the road. When she got going pretty good Dad pulled on the string and got the car going faster than Aunt Martha wanted, of course. They kept telling her "Just miss the trees! Just miss the trees!" I'm sure great fun was had by all.
According to Dad, one year he and his cousin and some friends decided it would be big fun to do a little tricking on Halloween. They built a post and barbed wire fence across the main street of the little town of Lodge Grass, MT. Didn't really hear how it turned out.
"It was a dud as we never did see anyone drive into it and the next day when we went to town it was gone. It was a lot of work for nothing." Dad
Another one of my favorite stories was Uncle Bernard and Dad getting an old sow with piglets all riled up and then somehow luring Uncle Charles into the barn and shutting him inside with this old sow. Next thing they knew, here came Uncle Charles flying out one of the windows!
Uncle James had a place up on Good Luck (Good Luck Creek, Bighorn County). One year they had cut the hay there and shocked it up. After it had dried a bit, they went back and picked up the shocks onto a wagon. James had a dog that tagged along with the person walking and picking up the shocks. This dog would go up to the shock and wait until it was lifted up, then if there was a snake under it the dog would jump in and grab the snake in its mouth and shake it until it died. These were rattlesnakes. This particular year, there were rattlesnakes under almost every shock, so the dog was busy. Because the snakes were under the shocks, they weren't out in the sun so they were maybe a little cooler and slower.
A couple of times they located rattlesnake dens on the family ranch. They didn't want rattlers around because of the livestock, not to mention the family. So they would wait until it started to get cold and then go dig up the den. There would be a big ball of the snakes, maybe 30 or 40, wrapped around each other trying to retain warmth. They would get the ball out and then start whacking at it with the sharp end of a shovel to kill the snakes.
The ranch that Dad grew up on, for at least part of his life, is just north of Lodge Grass, MT. A little ways out the back door of the main house, there is a swinging footbridge across the Bighorn River that they use to get to the pasture and upper fields, where a lot of the ranching actually happens. This bridge has 2 large steel cables that run across between the supports at each end and are anchored in the ground out beyond the supports. The walking part of the bridge hangs from these cables, and you have to be careful not to walk across in a rhythm or the bridge will start bouncing to the rhythm. It's been a while since I've seen it, but I'm guessing that it's about 50 or 60 feet across the river between the supports, and depending on the time of year maybe 8 or 10 feet above the water. It can be a little scary to walk across, but it's an important part of running the ranch. If the water is high enough in the summer, kids might jump off the bridge into the river for swimming.
Dad's mother's maiden name was Foster, and at one time her father, James Foster, owned this ranch. He maintained the footbridge and it was just as important to running the ranch then, maybe more so.
In the winter, the river would freeze up, maybe a foot deep or more all the way across. In the spring when it thawed out big chunks of ice would float down the river and pushing against each other the chunks would scrape out the banks on either side. Sometimes if a tree was too close to the river, this scraping would eventually bring down the tree.
This happened one winter when James Foster was running the place, and a branch of the falling tree happened to catch on the swinging bridge, pushing against the cables and threatening to break them. James saw this, grabbed a saw and went out to try to save the bridge. He went out onto the bridge where the tree had hung up and cut off the branch that had caught. When the branch was cut, the bridge cables sprang back and flung him into the river with the chunks of floating ice. A few people had come out of the house to watch this, among them was his wife. She ran along the bank of the river, following him as he struggled to get out of the icy cold river. She followed him quite a ways down the river, but he was unable to get out and died.
The bridge was repaired several times since then, but in the spring of about 2004 when the ice was going out, the bridge was taken out by the ice and no one went out to try to save it. It has not been rebuilt.
Below is the version that my grandmother, LuElla Foster Faught, recalled in 1964. It is probably more accurate than the version above.
James Clark built a swinging foot bridge to go back and forth across the river. In the fall of 1923 it started to rain and rained for 30 days raising the river to flood stage. A large tree floated down the river and a limb caught on the bridge. James took a saw out on the bridge and was sawing off the limb when it came loose and threw him in the river. He had on hip boots and his wife saw the top of his head going down the middle of the river. His body was not found until 22 days later.
Uncle James had a motorcycle at one time and he gave Dad a ride just down the road a little ways. On the way back to the ranch, apparently the carburetor or fuel line had been leaking and the engine caught fire. They quickly stopped and James tried to smother the flames with a sheepskin jacket. He told Dad to get into the bushes alongside the road and when Dad got there, James was right behind. Then they heard the motorcycle explode.
Somehow Uncle Lawrence recalls this story with him being the rider.
Both of our parents grew up in large families, so we have a lot of aunts, uncles and cousins. And other relatives of various sorts. Somewhere along the way, we added them all up and decided that we had 50 first cousins. At least it sounds good to say it as a nice round number. We recently went back and reviewed this using Dad's geneology data as a reference, and found that we have either 49, 50, 51 or 52 first cousins depending on how you look at it. We are not sure if one cousin was actually adopted when their parent married into the family (although they definitely count in spirit), and there were two different babies born that each lived a very short time. If you count all 3 of these as cousins, then we have 52 cousins.
But wait! That doesn't include my siblings and I, so between our parents' families there are 56 in our generation. Depending on how you look at it. Now I just say that I have about 50 first cousins.
One time when Dad was in the service he bought a five (5) pound box of candy at Christmas to mail to Mom. He gave the store a note to include in the package that was something mushy because they were in love. At the same time another serviceman bought a box of candy and gave the store a note to include. The store got the notes switched. When Mom received her package the note read "Merry Christmas to a wonderful sister." Imagine what the other person thought when she received the mush from her brother.
When we were living in Wheaton Dad spent a lot of time in Texas working on various projects. One day he called Mom and left a message that he would call her later. When he called back he decided to try to play a little trick on her. He disguised his voice and said "We have some very nice carpets on sale this month." Mom immediately hung up the phone. Dad called her again and said " Boy you really didn't want to buy any carpets, did you?" She said she was anxiously waiting for a call from me and didn't want to talk to a carpet salesman.
Dave recalls:
When I was in high school, there were no commonly available computers or even calculators. When we needed to do fun calculations in science classes, like physics and chemistry, we used slide rules. Slide rules were an accepted tool for doing a lot of engineering calculations. If you could get 3 digits of precision, that was great. Pi was 3.14 for most purposes. One evening, my Dad came home from work with some papers that looked like they were printed on a typewriter. He showed us that some of the papers had written instructions for doing some calculations and other papers had the results of doing those instructions typed out. I think my first thought was that somebody must be a really good typist to do all that without making any typo mistakes. Dad explained that they had a new machine at work called a computer that took in the instructions and typed out the results automagically. I don't remember my exact response to that, but of course it piqued my interest. Magic indeed! At some point after that, he brought home a book about Basic, the instruction language that the new machine at work understood. I think both my brother and I wrote out some simple sequences of instructions in Basic and Dad took them to work, ran them, and brought us back the results. Cool! That didn't actually last very long - maybe Dad was discouraged from doing non-work stuff on the nice, new machine at work or maybe we got tired of turnaround time of a few days.
One day sometime after that, my math teacher held up a book in front of the class and asked if anybody was interested in learning about a computer language called IITran. My hand shot up! He said there were a limited number of books available. I don't recall that anybody else held up their hand, but maybe I was just oblivious from excitement. In any case he handed me the book and said to see one of the other math teachers about it. When I saw the other teacher, he explained that there was a terminal in a conference room in the library that connected to a computer at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. The terminal was a Teletype Model 33 with paper tape reader and punch, and an acoustic coupler that attached to a regular phone handset. A regular phone handset - that is a whole other story. So we would write out a program on paper, type it into the teletype to punch out a tape, hopefully with no mistakes, then dial up the big computer on the phone and quick plug in the acoustic coupler when it answered. Then we could read in the paper tape and get the result printed out. We would generally do this in batches in order to make the best use of the phone connect time. There were about half a dozen students, including me, in the school of 2,000 that knew how to use this and were actively doing various projects on the computer. This went on for a couple of years, having fun doing whatever kinds of things we could dream up for the computer to do. There was no formal computer class and the number of kids doing this stayed about the same - some graduated and some new ones came in.
Towards the end of this time, the teacher told us that they were changing over to a different computer at Wheaton College, which was a whole different system that ran a timesharing version of the Focal language. We continued to use the same terminal in the same way, but got to learn a new, very different computer language. The end of the school year came up, and one other student and I were asked if we wanted to continue to use the Wheaton College computer over the summer. Somehow the two of us were enrolled in a computer class at the college for the summer. We did not have to pay for it. There was no formal class, it was just a way to give us access, although we had to check in with one of the teachers there once or twice. This was the first time that I got direct hands-on access to a computer system. It was a PDP12 made by Digital Equipment Corporation and was an interesting hybrid computer. Half of it was essentially a PDP8, which was a digital minicomputer with high-speed paper tape and reel-to-reel magnetic tape, and the other half was analog equipment with digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital convertors inbetween. It primarily used a Teletype Model 33 for keyboard input and print output, but on the analog side was a green cathode ray tube which functioned as an oscilloscope but could also be controlled from the digital side to display lines of ASCII characters. I seem to remember that the character display was not very easy to use from a program for some reason. This was the first time that I saw and used a computer video display. I guess it caught on.
The college only had the one computer available for students and faculty to use, so everyone had to sign up for time slots on it. During these times we had control of the complete system, the dial-in access was shut off along with the multiuser Focal system. The two of us from the high school went in together and traded back and forth during our time slots. Because we were technically freshmen, I guess, we got last choice for the available time slots and we ended up with late night or midnight hours most of the time. That actually made it more fun and it was a very enjoyable summer learning experience.
Dave might recall:
Not a lot of people know this story. It may or may not have really happened. When I was in high school chemistry class, there was a good friend that was rather more advanced than the rest of us in the class. He somehow decided to make a pipe bomb in his basement out of TNT with a mercury fulminate detonator from the chemical components. This is an extremely dangerous process, even more so if you have no experience. After a period of time, maybe a few months, one fine day we drove out into the country a ways with me holding this thing in my lap. I remember it being about 8 or 10 inches long of maybe 1.5 inch steel pipe, capped on both ends with a couple of wires coming out of a small hole. We parked and walked out into a farmer's field maybe a quarter mile with the device and a big spool of double strand wire. He attached the wires and set the thing down. I don't recall covering it up or burying it. We walked back to the car, opened the hood, and touched the wires to the battery. The bomb made a pretty good bang but not much else. We looked around for a while but only found one small piece of it. The farmer was probably pretty ticked off if he ran across any other pieces with any machinery.
These days I wonder if the friend faked this with just a piece of dynamite and a blasting cap stuck into a pipe, but I don't know how he could have gotten that or why he would fake it. I do believe that he had the ability to really make it from scratch, crazy as that would be. Maybe the chemical components would be just as hard or harder to get, I don't know.
There is a cemetery at Mount Vera, which is near where FosterMontana used to be located on Highway 47 between Hardin and Custer. The cemetery is about 5 acres, and basically donated by a local rancher. There are a number of Faughts buried there and some other people. Cousin Lyle and Diana especially have been looking into the legalities of the place, and have started a nonprofit organization that now owns the cemetery. Diana is president, I think Joyce is secretary, and Nancy is treasurer. A number of relatives have been contributing money and time towards upkeep of the place, and the nonprofit is going to take over paying the taxes of the property from the rancher.
There used to be a town of Foster in Montana founded by Grandma Faught's father and mother? The Faughts lived in a house in Foster that served as a post office, general store, and family residence. Grandpa Faught was a carpenter and built the home in Foster as well as a large community building, called Foster Hall, for meetings and dances. The Mt. Vera Cemetery is nearby.
Great Blues-style harmonica player from Dad's harmonica club. Does classes around the country and around the world. Makes harmonicas, Dad got 3 and gave one each to James and Lawrence. Nancy has met him or heard him.
Here are a couple of links:
Filisko.com
Custom Harmonicas