Topaz Oral History Project miscellaneous interviews: Jane Beckwith material

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Page 4 boy I did like to play sluff. Coun the cards, I thought I was pretty good, and I'd go out and play a few hands. The old Chief Rowhrback, was always a winning. After a little while it dawned on me that I might finesse for a ten or a ~ing or som thing like that for a few points, but he was even finessing the jacks. The old boj played cards so long and so many years he could keep a running count of the entire deck, the three hands. And so I got quite a sluff lesson. So I was glad when I got to play Old Maid or something like that, I was a little more confident in. But, what we saw out there was the buildings and how they were and the arrangement, the conditions and what not. And we kept a maintenance crew to keep that up until the government could dispose of the property. One of the things I remember was odds and ends used to disappear out there quite a bit in those days. And I remember, the hospital had two fifty-five gallon drums of straight grain. When they finally sold and cleared that out there was only fifty-five gallons left, and that is a whole lot of straight grain that disappeared, for one thing. A few other odds and ends, but the other thing we had to do was, we'd patrol the city every evening for an hour or two. We could ju~t visualize what would have happened if somebody started a fire on one side out there where it was real windy, and these old barracks were lumber and rather thin and pretty drafty and it would be disastrous so we done our fire fighting by closely