YUMMY-UGH!!

JOHN PIERSON:A few days ago one of you wrote about picking up a sugar beet and eating it when you were a kid.I did too.We lived on Canby Street for a while. Louis Tackach and the Arnold twins and I used to put nails, pennies,anything that would squash,on the tracks when the trains came by. It was lots of fun - at least we thought so then.The trains that ran by the house were on their way to the sugar factory, and every once in a while there would be that delicious sugar beet.

 The beets would fall off the train, or sometimes if there was a trainman on the train, he would throw one off to us.-----I picked one up about a year ago and brought it home like a treasure.  I cleaned it and cut it
into bite-size pieces,and put it in my mouth. #$@$@$%%^ ! 
It tasted horrible. I don't know the  difference, but maybe as kids we were easier to please.
 

Clara Lehman:  I vote with John. I think we must all have been deprived children, and just didn't know it.The last one I tried,  about 30 years ago tasted just like he described it! Or maybe they are growing a new,upgraded hybrid that has lost the "wonderful, natural taste" we thought we remembered?

Milt Cunningham:  John,I thought sugar beets were terrible tasting, too, but in the South Pacific during WW II I ate lots of sugar cane, rather squeezed the juice into my mouth.

The Appleblossom Dairy near Big Horn had dug a pit silo. But the lower end broke into an underground spring. They filled it with beet tops and pulp they got from the mill.It rotted and fermented, and the stench carried for two miles.

But the cows loved it. We could put out fresh alfalfa along side a pile of fermented beet tops, and they'd ignore the hay for the beets.But did it ever make good milk -- high sugar content.

Jim Askew : Have all of you forgotten how terrible the milk would taste during the beet season by reason of the tops being fed?

Clara Blakeman Lehman: I remember how much the taste of the milk changed just when the cows went back onto green grass in the springtime.Did the beet tops make it even worse?

Bob Hylton: OK,I'll have to weigh in here.Yes,Jim, I sure remember the taste of the milk -- though, since the whole town sometimesfeatured the beet odor, it may have been influenced by our sense of smell.

What I also remember well is that during The War (WW II, that would be), the Experimental Farm (doesn't sound quite right) up near the Country Club, had some beets out to grow in various gardens, ours among them (I think one beet per gardener, but not sure).Somewhere along the way I got a taste of one that we grew, and it was not the high point of my day. To this day, I think it miraculous that sugar is made from them, my skepticism generated from that early (awful) taste of sugar beet.

I also remember some of the teachers' volunteering to work the beet fields as part of their war effort.My Dad did, and I would bet that Mary Alice's Dad was right next to him.  Dad was pretty much done in by the work, although he grew up on a farm, and had nothing but admiration for the regular beet workers' endurance.

Since I started with the war, does anyone remember some of the war bond campaigns on Main Street?  If your family bought a bond, you could "fire" a machine gun. A big thrill!I remember driving to Billings for my first glasses, at 35 miles an hour a long half-day's drive. I will just mention the trip back to the Missouri farm one summer--four days! No A/C and the car boiled at least twice a day. 

We were suckered into any number of back-flushes,none of which improved that '36 Chevy (black, of course).Then,as now,it was buyer bewares.

Ethel Wood Sheets: You don't suppose they aren't as sweet now because our "Sweet Tooth" has been saturated!" I know when I was
a kid -- a younger one anyway - we never had any pop and very seldom had candy. Mom sometimes would take sugar and put it in a pan and get it to melting and it would turn carmel color. Then after it cooled we'd crunch it down.It was really good.I remember she made some when we had gone to Lake Geneva on a pack trip.    And to make chewing gum - as you were riding through the pine trees--  you could snatch off pieces of hard pinesap and eat it....Yak ...kkk.  

It was strong.Or we'd chew wheat and you could make really good gum with it...usually though it would get to tasting so good you'd swallow it before it got to the gum stage...Just my 2-bits..... 

Jim Askew: Well, tell Ethel we have all done that. It's just that now, we all admit to having done those simple  things that really gave meaning to the simple life.

Milt Cunningham: Or maybe we were just simple minded.

Beet forks.They were the size of coal forks, but the tines had knobs on the ends to keep them from penetrating the beets. Those migrant workers would scoop 3 or 4 beets at a time and hoist them into a high-sided truck all day long. I don't think I could have lifted a forkful,much less do it hour after hour.