Bill Carriker, a neighbor at Royston, said Larry was sure going to be mad when he grew up and learned that his mama had been a goat. When our two oldest kids were little bitty kids, and we had this two-holer off down there under the shade of a mesquite tree, Ima said to me one day, "I wish you would go down there and peep and see what those kids are doing. They've been in there a long time. No telling what they're doing in there." I peeped, all right, and found them just sitting there, doing their thing and talking with each other. As our country got deeper into World War II, the quality of kerosene went way down. It didn't burn well enough in our Servel refrigerator to make the box cold, and it left a lot of soot on the wick. So I mixed white gasoline with the kerosene to bring the quality back up. I told my neighbors the good news but they were afraid to mix the gasoline in. So they suffered with warm refrigerators while we enjoyed cold luxury. Again I was out front, but my neighbors thought I was crazy. We heated our Royston home with oil. It was much more convenient than wood. And although we had plenty of wood, the oil proved to be cheaper than hauling and bothering with the wood. We had an oil heating stove that heated all four rooms of our house. It would burn used lube oil with just a little kerosene mixed with it. Some filling stations in Hamlin saved their used oil for us. We lighted our heater in the fall and didn't shut it off until spring. I kept an expense account one winter and our entire fuel bill was $12. By 1940 the price of cream was up and a year later it was up even more. We had a lot of cows that gave a little milk each, and we already had a cream separator. So we bought a gasoline engine to run the separator and I started milking the cows and selling cream. That paid so well that we started feeding the cows more and selling more cream. Our cream was bringing three dollars a day and we were feeding the skim milk to hogs that were gaining two dollars a day. Oh boy! The depression seemed to be over for us. But it turned out that this business had another side to it. The work was killing us. I sat there milking by hand three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, and the weather was hot. By the time I had milked those twenty cows, I could almost swim in my own sweat. When I walked I could hear it squash in my shoes; and I smelled so bad I had to bathe before the tractor would let me get close to it. There was only one good thing about it; it beat maize hauling ten to one. While I was milking one cow, Anita was feeding the next one and getting her ready to be milked, Dennis was carrying milk to the house and pouring it into the separator which was being driven by the gasoline engine, and Ima was filling in here and there and keeping house and seeing after Larry.