Part 11

Managing the goats became a more and more difficult task. War time industries had started hiring everyone they could get their hands on. This left us with experienced and uninterested herders who soon were leaving small bands of goats out on the range, and we began received reports of roaming goats in several areas.

One such band of goats spent the night in William Boyd's driveway eating the flowers he'd planted in big clay pots atop the square stone posts that supported the rail fence along the edge of his drive. Bill and his wife were home, but before they awakened Laurence Houston woke me. We rounded up and penned the goats, swept the drive, then I drove to the valley bought new geraniums for the pots.

Kidding time arrived just as the rainy season began. Each new kid required a shelter of its own. We also had to place a toggle on a hind leg so the young goats could be staked at their shelters and not wander away with their mother who would hide them deep in the brush.

Kidding time was an all day, all night affair that went on for about 10 days. Some mothers dropped their kids in the pen with the main herd. These at times lost track of their own kids and would fail to recognize them later on. Mary cared for a dozen baby goats in boxes and tubs in front of the fireplace on our worst ever rainy night. She fed them with baby bottles so they'd have a chance to reunite with their mothers the next day, nevertheless we lost many of these young animals.

Angora goats often laid down and died in a cold rain, their long thick silky hair unable to protect them from the elements. When shearing time rolled around we were short handed once again and worked hours on end without a hint of a break.

With all the excitement that war time activity generated going on around us we started to feel isolated and out of touch at Deer Springs Ranch deep in the coastal mountains. We'd met some of the pilot instructors at the primary training school in Oxnard, and they stopped by the ranch rather often encouraging me to sell out and come work with them as a flight instructor. Refresher training so I could qualify as an instructor was offered, and the pay was good - $600 a month to start, a handsome sum at that time, far more than I made at Deer Springs Ranch. Mary and I began planning.

I attended some of the flying school socials and met the school commander. He assured me I'd have a chance to show my ability as a pilot, and said there was time enough to qualify as a flight instructor. We arranged for Laurence Houston and his father to take over the goat heard, and I went to the training base for my physical examination and other preliminaries so I could begin as a flight instructor trainee. That however was not to be my fortune, as the flight instructor training program was discontinued before I completed requirements to participate.

Wartime and thoughts of home go hand in hand. We were a long way away from Arizona, and deeply disappointed that our goat raising venture had not panned out as hoped. That, along with flight instructor prospects and working in the pilot training program having fallen through, brought with it an urgent sense of needing to be near family once again.

Saying our goodbyes to Mr. Chamberlain and all concerned, it wasn't long until we boarded the Sunset Limited passenger train at Union Station in Los Angeles. Traveling through the night as our children slept, across mile after mile of mountains and desert back home to Phoenix, with only the vaguest of ideas about what we might encounter on arrival, our young family like many others found itself adrift in the upheaval as well as the opportunities of the times.