Alicia Kay Burk - Linda Kay Flake - Dolores Jordan - George Jordan

"Spike" the umpire

This was a letter written to George Comber for a school project in which his grandfather told him about
"WHAT TOOK PLACE IN OUR COUNTRY WHEN I WAS A LITTLE BOY"
Story written by George Ernest Jordan
January 6, 1966

I was born in Pocatello, Idaho April 3, 1898. My mother (Mary Jane Peake) was washing and hanging our clothes, when I decided it was time for me to enter this world. We didn't have a doctor to deliver me, so my mother had a mid wife. Which is a woman who helps women in childbirth. My parents didn't have very much money. We lived across the railroad track near the railroad yards where my father (Edward Thomas Jordan) worked. When I was a small boy just eight years old my father was hurt in the railroad yards and died (July 3, 1907) My mother had a large family, 5 girls and 6 boys. When my father died he didn't leave my mother very much money, so we all had to work so we could live. I sold newspapers on the street corners, shined shoes and I would turn all the money I earned over to my mother to help feed and clothe us so we could go to school.
I worked ever since I was 10 years old and I did plenty odd jobs. I was a pin setter in a bowling ally, messenger boy for the western union and I used to have a little red wagon the I pulled along the Railroad yard picking up lumps of coal that fell off the railroad cars, as they were switched from one track to another so we could keep warm and cook our meals. We didn't know what gas was at the time. We didn't have electric lights, we would burn kerosene lamp. We didn't have a bathroom like you have now. We had to take our bath in a wash tub (metal) my mother used to wash her clothes in it. Our toilet was outside. We called it a privey or outhouse. We didn't have running water so we had a pump and metal zinc. We had a kitchen stove that would bun wood and coal and had a reservoir that we would get warm water for our baths or heat water in a bucket. There was no such thing a Electric Lights, telephone, radio, television, but we had one of the fist old Edison phonograph, silent movies, opera houses and road shoes, and how we enjoyed them.
When I got older I worked for the railroad as a call boy (calling freight train crews) then checking cars (car clerk), freight clerk, manifest clerk, E&F timekeeper, etc. When I was 15 years old I was considered one of the best swimmers and high divers around Ogden Utah. I made high dives of 65 feet from the 31st Bridge over Weber River from a moving freight train. Also every Sunday night at Lagoon, a pleasure resort, I did a FIRE DIVE from 35 feet into the swimming area of the lake. For instance we danced the 3 step, 2 step, one step waltz.
In my life time the following have been invented. Telephones, Electric Lights, automobiles, airplanes, radio, television and motorcycles.