When I was 13 I made the interesting discovery that a flashlight consisted of nothing more than two cells, a bulb, a container for the cells, and some kind of switch. I couldn't afford to buy a flashlight so I made me one. I used a radiator hose to put the cells in, a copper wire for a bulb holder, and I pushed the bulb down against the center post of the cell to switch the light on. I was beginning to learn a little about electricity. This was the beginning of my knowledge of how to wire our house for electric lights. Yes, I did the wiring; we couldn't afford to hire it done. Shortly after we moved to Hamlin there was another new adventure in our lives. It involved a little detour to Gorman, Texas, to do some road work. You remember the truck that Papa let Frank use to go everywhere and haul whatever people would pay him to haul. Well, by the time we landed in Hamlin, Frank was getting tired of hauling everything for everybody. So Papa inherited one good used truck from one tired-of-trucking boy named Frank. Papa also had a friend named Marvin Hood who was building a paved road near Gorman. I think it was generally understood that Marvin could use some of us if we would come on down to his camp. We needed to work--for pay, that is--so we took the truck and an old Dodge car and went to see Marvin. Sure enough, Marvin could use us four boys, and Papa could haul supplies in his truck. We lived in a canvas tent in a pasture about a half-mile from the rock quarry from which they were getting rock for the road. Albert became waterboy; Earl was powder monkey, in charge of all blasting. Joel operated a road grader which was pulled by horses. I fired a steam boiler and made steam for a steam drill to drill holes into the earth. And into these holes Earl would put his dynamite and blasting powder, which, when set off by a fuse and blasting cap, excavated the rocks which were crushed and then hauled and placed on the road which Joel had smoothed so perfectly with his little grader. We were doing so many things for Marvin, I wondered how he managed before we got there. Marvin paid his hands three dollars a day and they paid him one dollar a day to eat at his cook shack. We didn't eat there; we could eat much cheaper at our tent. There were two men cooking for the crew, but they got to drinking so much and cooking so badly that Marvin was losing some of his workers. He had a problem. So Marvin came to Mama and asked her to cook for him. He hired a farm woman to help Mama and together they cooked for the men. And Marvin let our family eat at the cook shack at half price. As usual Mama wouldn't throw out any food if it could be used in any way. She took the left-over biscuits and made coldbread pudding out of them. At first the men were reluctant to sample the dish. But after getting a taste of it, most of them asked for more--and they called it "make-'em-eat-it."