A year and change after Donna was born on April 21 1948, Mom notes: “Moved to M.C. [Miles City] in July 49 – The Company built 42 houses plus a building at the “Reform School” in Miles – 51 and 52 built 10 miles road east of M.C. – took out 42 curves.” A later inserted note: “David born M.C. – Dec. 6 – 1951.” Future numerologists and believers in kabala will, no doubt, ponder long and hard over that symmetry of eliminating 42 curves and building 42 houses.
One of those houses, on a corner lot at 704 South Jordan, became the Holzworth home. A lawn, saplings, sandbox and clothesline were installed in short order, followed by a fenced backyard when David became mobil. The clothesline poles were unlike anything seen before or since. Dad or Terry must have welded 4 inch pipe or larger together in a "T" shape, then used a silver metallic paint to finish the job. The base pole was set in concrete. To say that it was overbuilt would be a gross understatement. Mom planted pansies and geraniums along the side of the house. Another one of the houses at 711 Miriam Street across the alley and in the center of the block became the home of Doris’s brother Kenneth, wife Doris and daughter Judy. Grandma Bell moved in with them to care for Judy for a short period when Doris and Kenneth worked on a job in Texas. Scotty became attached to Kenneth and spent more time around Miriam than he did on Jordan.
Even with all the construction, the greater engineering feat may have been the delivery of David Allen on December 6, 1951, weighing in at 10 lbs., 11 oz., growing to nearly the size of Donna (aka Baby Doll)within 16 months. One of the many family jokes turns on that cluster of three memorable dates: the birthdays of David and Terry on the 6th and 8th, with Pearl Harbor sandwiched in between on the 7th. Dad came up with a less stressful way of remembering birthdays. He used to drag out a calendar (any month) and say he could 'look up' the birthdays of all 3 older children by noting that Terry's on the 8th, Ginny Gay's on the 15th and Pat's on the 22nd were all exactly 7 days apart and therefore in a vertical line on the calendar. Consequently, David's on the 6th was two days before Terry and Donna on the 21st was one day before Pat. All he had to do was remember which kid went with which month.
One wonders what the women-folk were talking about the spring of that year. In short succession two cousins were born: David Allen Siegle, the youngest child of Dick’s sister Martha, on January 11, 1952 and, Mark, the oldest child of Dolores Wold who was Martha’s oldest daughter, on January 25, 1952. The three cousins would spend a good deal of time playing together in childhood and trying to sort how an uncle could be only a few days older than a nephew.
The move of eighty miles from Glendive to Miles City in 1949 took much longer over the old road than the frequent trips back and forth after the 42 curves were eliminated. Mom notes: “We spent two summers in Glendive.” The girls went to a Methodist Church day camp and took turns staying on Aunt Martha and Uncle Bill’s farm.
The frequent and familiar drives back and forth to Glendive served as another venue for the Holzworth love of singing and games. Favorite car songs: You Are My Sunshine, She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain When She Comes, This Old Man, One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall, Ate a Peanut to the tune of There's a Whole in My Bucket and singing along with whatever came up on the car radio. If he was along, Dad always requested Battle of New Orleans. Not everyone knew all the verses, but everyone chimed in on the chorus: "Well, we - fired our guns and the British kep' a-comin', wasn't near as many as there was awhile ago........." He also had a couple of mildly off-color songs and some barnyard poetry that the kids could usually coax out of him. This material comes, like Homer's Odyssey, from an oral tradition, and will not be reduced to writing here. Guileful children can usually wheedle it from their parents. Remarkably, almost no one needs to hear any of it a second time before committing it to permanent memory.
Favorite Car Games: Going through the alphabet by spotting road signs in sequence that contained the next letter (had to know when the Quaker State and Texaco were coming up); reciting the next line on a sequential Burma Shave sign before it could be seen; holding your breath over the long bridges just in case they collapsed before the car got to the other side; counting white crosses on the roadside that marked places of fatal accidents; spotting the "Lighning" sign on the roof of the barn on Grandma Siegle's homestead farm near Fallon; "I am thinking something that is [color, shape, size ,etc.] and the others try to guess it in twenty questions or less.
Before 1954, when Grandma Bell moved to Miles City to stay with Kenneth, and after 1956 when she moved back to the Douglas Street house in Glendive, some of the family stayed at her place when visiting. Glendive and Miles City were great small-town rivals, so Grandma Bell would always bet a penny on the Glendive team against all takers. Some of these games, football and basketball, were broadcast on radio. Grandma was also an avid Canasta player (two deck variety), so all of the kids added that game to the repertoire.
Uncle Bill bought the Douglas Street house so all of the Siegle kids, after Dolores, would have a place to live in town and go to high school. The house could be divided in two parts and had two kitchens. Grandma Bell lived in the smaller part.
Terry, Pat and Virginia adapted quickly to the new schools and made new friends in Miles City. Terry switched from saxophone to clarinet over one summer between his junior and senior year and was accomplished enough to challenge and win the first chair concert position at the start of school in the fall. Pat also remembers that Terry played the saw with a violin bow out back in the garage and made some pretty interesting music.
Pat and Uncle Kenneth’s daughter Judy became fast and life-long friends. Pat also made friends with Sandra Ewalt who lived near the reservoir at the end of South Jordan. Sandra "had a Pinto and a Shetland pony, and we 'rode the fence' of the res every weekend until we moved to SLC."
About this time, Pat and Virginia started piano lessons. Virginia took piano first for awhile at Sacred Heart from a nun; after Pat went along once she knew then and there she would NOT take lessons if that was the only option! Pat took lessons instead from a woman working in the back of the record store. Virginia moved on to the saxophone.
Donna enrolled in Mrs. Hamlet's Kindergarten, blazing the path and starting another set of teacher expectations that David would eventually need to meet. Mrs. Hamlet charged ten dollars a month for tuition. Her school was about a block away from home, in the basement of her house. Donna also had a red toy wagon that had her name painted on it. Pat was the artist, and she used left over silver metallic paint from teh clothesline project. David could not read, so did not think twice about using Donna's wagen to haul things around, like his brother Terry, who added a turbo charger with his hands to the rear wheels when the going got a little tough.
David, being the youngest, got lots of attention from the older kids, in part because he was always getting into something: a chocolate cake pan left unattended, his diaper pail and then wandering around so much outside that he was finally rigged with a harness that could be attached to the clothesline when a fence around the backyard was not enough.
By now you should be wondering why this segment is called the Move to Buster’s Cattlefield. This requires a little historical background. Wikipedia gets it right: After the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, the US Military created forts in eastern Montana including one where the north-flowing Tongue River flowed into the east-flowing Yellowstone River. Fort Keogh (named after one of the battle dead) started as a few rough winter cabins, but grew into a moderate sized western fort, from which its commander, General Nelson A. Miles, effectively brought the remaining "uncontrolled" Native Americans into subjugation during the last decade of the 1800s. At first the camp followers referred to the makeshift village as "Milestown", but popular usage (perhaps more accurately "self-promotion") turned it to "Miles City". Livestock speculation brought thousands of cattle to the open ranges in the late 1880s, the railroad was extended through the area, and Texas drove numerous cattle to Miles City to fatten them on free grass and move them to where they could be loaded on trains bound for the slaughterhouses in Chicago.
In his inimitable way, Dad made short the transition from a fort associated with Custer and the Little Bighorn to the “Cow Capital of the West.” Custer’s Battlefield became Buster’s Cattlefield.
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