11/24/01
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PHS Bulldogs On-Line
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Nov 24, 2001
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2 Bulldog alumni notes and a football score today:
Sharon Figgins Spenard (61)
Cliff Brown (67)
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State tournament semifinals (11/24):
Pasco 21 - Mountain View 0
State Championship game on December 1 at 7:30 pm in the Tacoma Dome:
Kentwood @ Pasco
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From: Sharon Figgins Spenard (61)
I moved to Dayton from Las Vegas, NV almost 4 years ago. I was wondering when there was going to be a reunion. I had lived the past 22 years in Las Vegas, prior to that 4 years in Germany.
Sharon Figgins Spenard (61)
Dayton, WA
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From: Cliff Brown (67)
Wheat farms are another thing worth describing more. Just before harvest they are large undulating fields of yellow, which smell better than anything you can imagine. Even earlier in the year, when they are still green and don't make the same rustling sound as you walk through them, the smell will get into your soul. I learned about gluten then, though I didn't know what you called it. If you took a hand full of raw wheat, which you could get by rubbing the broken heads together and blowing away the chaff, and if you chew the wheat kernels just right, with not too much saliva, you can turn it into gum. I figured out it was gluten when, thirty-two years later, Steve Felton explained to me that the reason my sourdough bread was hard as rock was because I had not beaten it to activate the gluten, which forms long strings of sticky proteins and traps the carbon dioxide given off by fermenting yeast, causing it to rise. At the time I knew nothing of this; I just thought it was neat how it turned into gum. And I liked the taste.
I spent a lot of time tromping and driving through the wheat -- either changing sprinklers, driving a truck, or driving combine. It was a slow progression, generally requiring at least a year to move from one job to another. Doug [brother] and I both worked for a guy named Van something [Casey], and he taught us about how to maintain pickups. He was pissed as all hell with us once because one truck was too low and another too high in oil. I never realized you could have too much oil. But it blows out the valve seals. Anyway, Doug and I would drive these old farm trucks all over the back roads. Later, when doing the same thing on a potato farm, since you irrigate twenty-four hours a day, at night we'd spot rabbits in the headlights staring at us. They make great targets for a twenty-two rifle about that time. We bagged 20 or 30 rabbits once doing that. And we got very proficient at racing along small dirt roads and breakneck speeds, unsafe in any vehicle.
This wheat farmer Van was a volunteer fireman. We'd be sitting out in a truck, waiting for him to finish going round a field and fill up the combine with wheat, when he might spot a plume of smoke coming up off a distant field. Fire in wheat country is very serious business. It can race through a field and wipe out a farmer in minutes. So we'd drop everything and head back to this garage I guess the county had built for him. We'd jump on his four-wheel drive fire truck and race over to wherever the fire was burning to fight it. Once, we even had to go around to the Kahlotus side of the Snake River to fight a big one there. We probably crossed the dam at Ice Harbor. We had a team of guys on top of one side of a ravine to the west of the fire. We were trying to wet down the ground and dig a break with shovels to stop it. It was just working its way slowly down a bank on the other side of the ravine, burning the sage brush and cheat grass, but not moving real fast. But when it got to the bottom of the ridge, it created its own wind and blew itself up the side where we were working in a matter of seconds. I remember this huge blast of hot air and hundreds of tumble weeds blowing straight over the top of us and landing many yards on the other side of the break we had made. Probably burned 100,000 acres before it was over. Gave me tremendous respect for fires.
Cliff Brown (67)
Bogota, Colombia
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