Neighbor Grover sez five-fourths of people admit they are bad with fractions.
Anew book available on Amazon is entitled
My Life at Pleasant Hill: A Child’s Perspective.
Pleasant Hill is (was) a small farming community some 10 miles southwest of Rockdale. It now consists essentially of a cemetery but once had a school house and church, both once hubs of community activity.
The author is Dr. Harry Gordon Harris Jr., PhD (RHS Class of 1956), longtime head of the petroleum engineering department at the University of Wyoming, and consultant with major oil companies around the world.
His nickname growing up was “Gooch.” I now call him “Dr. Gooch.” His older brother Ken Harris and I were best buds in high school. Gooch was two years younger.
Their mother was Mildred Luckey Harris Baker, oldest child of Homer Milton Luckey and Katie Lee McNiel Luckey who farmed at Pleasant Hill. This book starts with Dr. Gooch’s memories of times spent at that farm.
Mildred was a genealogist long before genealogy became the rage. Ever ready to take a pencil to a tablet, she literally had a full wall of bookshelves full of her writings about the people of Pleasant Hill and beyond.
Much of Dr. Gooch’s book (he was kind enough to send me an advance copy) is based on Mildred’s journals and I’m thankful he’s produced this labor of love. It would be a stretch to think Pleasant Hill would wind up on the New York Times best-seller list, but I sure as heck wish it would.
The book also includes some of Ken’s recollections. Two of those:
• Mom (Grandmother Luckey) had a brother named Rush McNiel. When he was a child he was in a gun accident—shot through the head with a .22 rifle. Mom said the bullet went into one temple and came out the other. They took him to a doctor who ran a silk cloth through his head, one side to the other, to clean out the wound. He lived to an old age. He had a son, O.B. McNiel.
• When Mom’s (Grandmother Luckey’s) brother, Larkin McNiel, 93, and his sister Hallie, 99, were in a nursing home together, Larkin told of his 90-year chewing tobacco habit. He said he was 3 years old when he swiped some from an older brother and never quit. Larkin said to Hallie: “You know, Hallie, I’ve had a little stomach trouble through the years and I talked to several doctors about it. They all told me it might be caused by chewing tobacco.” Then he paused and said, “You know, Hallie, all those doctors are dead now.”
The book concludes with a final attachment, My Life at Pleasant Hill by Mildred. She wrote it in 1987 because a brother-in-law was taking college courses in Nevada and a prof told him to “get information from an older person about a different lifestyle.”
Mildred attended school at Pleasant Hill through eight grades. Then she attended Rockdale High School. She rode a horse into Rockdale on Mondays and stayed with kin in town, then rode it back to Pleasant Hill on Fridays.
That’s a different lifestyle.
Born during WW I, Mildred witnessed the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, WW II, the post-war growth of the nation, the birth of TV, the Korean War, the Race to the Moon, Vietnam and so much more.
So glad she loved keeping journals. So glad Dr. Gooch—no stranger to research himself—has compiled such a fascinating read.
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