WHAT  FOLLOWS  IS  A  TRANSCRIPTION  of a tape recording made by my dad, George H. Phillips in the hospital room of his brother, William B. Phillips. Dad was a great storyteller and had been asked to tell some stories of his youth. Some dates, places, and even the name of his grandfather, Levi Bushnell, whom he never knew, are inaccurate as he was speaking from memory.

"December 21, 1976"

This is George Phillips and I am sitting here in the hospital room with my brother, Bill, and his wife Jennie, and my wife, Millie. We have Jennie's new Hitachi recorder and we're going to make a few comments and talk a little bit about old times and we sure can remember a lot of old times because we're not young anymore.

Bill and I were raised in the little town of Brentford in the north central part of South Dakota. We lived there from about the early 1920's or a little earlier up until we both graduated from high school and went our individual ways. Our dad ran a lumber yard in town and his name was William R. Phillips, but he was always known as Bill. To keep my dad and my brother separated, they called them Big Bill and Little Bill. My brother Bill says that ain't true.

My brother Bill was born in a place called Osceola, South Dakota, which is in Kingsbury County, north of DeSmet on February 9, 1910. I remember seeing a picture of my dad and myself. I was about two years old at the time outside the house we lived in and we had a nice little dog and the earliest that I can remember around that time personally was that we used to put Bill into a cradle and it belonged to somebody else and we'd go calling on people and we'd have this cradle. It had a clockwork mechanism so that it would rock and go tic, tock, tic, tock.

I was born in Platteville, Wisconsin, which is in Grant County, on the 21st of July, 1907. My parents never lived in that county or even in Wisconsin. My dad was in business in Blunt, South Dakota and my mother went to visit her mother who was then living in Platteville and I was born there. When I was a couple of weeks old my mother took me back to South Dakota.

Now we've got us born, we might as well get back into the early days of our parents. I can remember mother telling that she taught at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for a couple of years and this must have been in the 1890's because my mother and father were married in 1904, I believe, and mother used to work on the newspaper in Blunt, which was called the Blunt Advocate, and she was a pretty good photographer. As a matter of fact, I can remember the old trunk she had when she had a lot of personal possessions in there. There was a Eastman folding camera and materials for processing pictures and she was also a very fine piano player, and she played the mandolin, and she taught piano for many years in Brentford.

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Our dad was born in England and came to this country when he was about 12 years old. His father had preceded the family by about six years so my father hadn't seen his father for those six years and when he got to this country he decided he didn't like his father very much so he ran away from home. He was about 15, I think, at that time and he went out to Pierre, South Dakota to be a cowboy.

I can remember his telling a few anecdotes about himself. He started out to be a cowboy but he got bucked off a horse and broke a leg and never did go back into cowboying again. But I remember him saying he bought a pair of new cowboy boots and a rancher gave him a job pitching hay and the new boots hurt my dad's feet and he got so many blisters on them that he said "By golly, I went from hay cock to hay cock on my hands and knees." Heh Heh Heh. That's the way my dad laughed. That's why I put that in there.

I remember my dad telling about being in he livery stable business in Blunt and in those days when you were in the livery stable business you drove around in a buggy or some kind of a vehicle because there weren't many cars in those days and one of my dad's customers was Peter Norbeck, who later became governor and U.S. Senator from South Dakota. At that particular time Peter Norbeck was one of the partners in a well drilling outfit called Norbeck and Michelson and they drilled water wells all up and down the Missouri River and my dad used to haul Mr. Norbeck up and down the way while he went out and tried to sell water well contracts to the farmers.

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My mother's parents were named Bushnell and I believe that her father's name was...My grandfather, that is, our mother's father is buried in Blunt Cemetery and I've seen his tombstone many times and I believe that his first name is Isaiah but it could have been Isaac. His wife, that would be my mother's mother, her name was Johanna Bloemers and her maiden name was Bloemers. I always thought that was my mother's middle name, too, because my mother always said her name was Alma Bushnell and she didn't have a middle name and after I learned that her mother's last name was Bloemers I just surmised that was it. When I teased her about that she kind of blushed and laughed a little bit and denied it.

Since I was the oldest in the family the chore of taking (care) of the younger kids was quite often mine until my sister, Ruth, got old enough that she would do it. But I can remember when this Bill here was about seven or eight years old and he had some peculiar bony growths on the front of his knees. I guess it was the meanness coming out on him. He couldn't walk around very well so I used to put him in a wagon and haul him around in this wagon and I remember one time we went out and watched them play baseball, a bunch of kids, and I parked my brother Bill in this wagon out in center field and there was a guy hit a long fly ball that went out there and Bill was looking up and saw this fly ball coming right at him. He wasn't old enough to judge the fly very well and he got his head right back and that ball hit him right smack in the neck. Hit him right on the adam's apple. Knocked him out of that wagon and rolled him over a couple of times. Shut him up for a little while.

Our father's family consists of, besides his mother and father, there were two sisters who came to this country with the family from England and a brother who was born in this country. The sisters were Sue and Elizabeth. I believe Elizabeth was the oldest but there was not more than a couple of years difference in their ages and the son who was born in this country was named Walter. Walter lived in Waseca, Minnesota in his later years and he died there. His widow is named Ann Phillips and she still lives there.

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My mother's family was a very large one. The Bushnell family went to Blunt. I think they were originally from Wisconsin and they went to Blunt in the early territorial days and somebody stole the lumber that they had shipped out there to build a house out of, so Grandfather built a sod house and our mother, whose name was Alma, was born in this sod house.

There were, I believe, either eleven or twelve children in the family. The oldest daughter in my mother's family, that would be my mother's oldest sister, her name was Minnie and Aunt Minnie lived to be a very old lady and eventually moved out to Tacoma, Washington where she died and two of her sons were living out there. She married a man by the name of Foote. One son, Arthur, died while trying to drive a four horse team hooked onto a covered wagon across the Yellowstone River. It was at a flood stage and the wagon and team got caught in the flood waters and Arthur drowned while trying to get them out. He was a veteran of the Spanish-American War and was one of our mother's favorite brothers.

Other sisters were Inez and Esther. The youngest one in the family as I remember was George, after whom I was named and he also moved out to the state of Washington and lived out at Diamond, Washington for many years and to the best of my knowledge, he is no longer living.

I can't remember the names of my mother's other brothers or sisters but I do know that there were two, I believe, at least, maybe more that died while they were relatively young and who are buried in the family cemetery in Blunt.

Once when I was visiting in Blunt I met a man that had lived there for a long time and he knew all about our family. He was a retired postmaster. I don't recall his name now. At any rate, this man said he remembered when our grandfather died in Blunt and they were going to have the funeral in the little community church there. There came up a terrific tornado. I've seen pictures of this tornado and this is one of the great early storms in the Dakota Territory in that part of the country. At any rate, the story that I am told by this man is that everybody left the church and just left the deceased in the coffin in there and that the windstorm picked the church up off it's foundation and turned it completely around and set it down again.

Why don't you say something, Bill, about your basketball days. What was the team you played with?

"Stratford legionnaires."

Following is a second transcription. I don't know if it was made at the same time, but the time is still Christmas, 1976.

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"This is George Phillips recording some reminiscences about the Phillips family for the benefit of my brother, bill, and his wife, Jennie. My wife, Millie, and I are visiting them over Christmas and this is 1976.

After our mother died in 1928 our father tried to hold the family together in the little town of Brentford, South Dakota where he was a manager of a lumber yard but things were pretty tough in those days and most of the children were old enough that our father felt he could do better for them by letting them find homes with friends and neighbors. I, being the oldest, and a junior in college at the time of mother's death, proceeded on my own to finish school and become a newspaper man.

Brother Bill, who is three and a half years younger than I am attended State College for a couple of years then went into farming and eventually into the construction business.

Our sister, Ruth, the next youngest after Bill, or the third in the family, went to Aberdeen where she got a job as a bookkeeper in a creamery and eventually married a young man from that part of the state named Albert E. Lange. They now live in Richfield, Minnesota, a part of Minneapolis.

The daughter, Audree, married a local man by the name of Bill Eske and they went to California where they made their home. Although they are no longer married to each other, Audrey has stayed in California.

The next daughter is Kathryn and she made her home with the Bill LaBay family. Mr. and Mrs. Bill LaBay were very good friends of our parents and had a number of children of their own but managed to make room for Kathryn. However, after Kathryn graduated from high school in Brentford she came to Emporia, Kansas where Millie and I were then living and attended college, graduating from Emporia State College. She became a physical therapist at the Warm Springs Foundation in Warm Springs, Georgia.

The next member of the family is Walter, although we have always called him Bud. He made his home with Mr. and Mrs. Emo Oberby on a farm a couple of miles from the town. After he graduated from high school he worked at various occupations and eventually became a student at South Dakota State University where I was teaching at the time and became a manager of the Wall Street Journal in San Francisco. He is production manager of the Western States division of the Wall Street Journal.

My mother had a baby about nine months or so before she passed away, a son whom they named Arden. After mother died, father could not keep the baby, or so he thought, so he left it for adoption with Mr. and Mrs Brady Reynolds, a childless couple who lived near town. Mrs. Reynolds, her first name was Kate, was a very fine woman and had been the elementary school teacher for most of the older members of the family.

Kate and Brady Reynolds raised Arden and he took the name of Arden Reynolds. He retired a year or two ago from the Air Force after serving a number of hitches in Germany, where he married a German girl, Anneliese. He and his wife live now in Santa Ana, California.

Perhaps it might be interesting for me to give the full names of the children, the Phillips clan. Father's name was William Roswell Phillips and our mother's full name was Alma Bushnell Phillips. My name is George Howard Phillips, the Howard being taken from my father's early business partner in Blunt, South Dakota, a Mr. James Howard. Brother Bill's full name is William Bushnell Phillips, the Bushnell, of course, being our mother's maiden name. Sister Ruth's full name is Ruth Elizabeth Phillips, the Elizabeth being the name of my father's oldest sister. Audree's full name is Audree Estelle Phillips and I am not sure where the middle name came from, but I believe that it was the first name of a dear friend of mother's. Our brother Walter's full name is Walter Arthur Phillips and the Arthur comes from the name of one of our mother's older brothers. Our sister Kathryn's full name is Kathryn Esther Phillips and her name comes from one of our mother's sisters.

I can recall a number of incidents associated with our childhood, some filled with pathos and others with humor. The one I am thinking of now perhaps has an element of both.

The house where we lived was a large two story frame house on the edge of this little town of Brentford. We had a fenced in back yard that was pretty good sized and there was a little chicken coop in the back edge of it where my mother always kept a few chickens.

This one particular Sunday my mother asked Dad to kill a chicken so we could have it for Sunday dinner. Well, my brother Bill had made a pet out of one of the old hens. I remember very clearly it was a black hen with some rather beautiful colored feathers around it's neck and by making a pet of it he got it so it was tame enough that he could go right up to it and grab it. Most of the the chickens would run if you made a motion in their direction.

We kids were playing out in the back yard when Dad stepped out on the porch and looked around to find a chicken and the first one at hand was this old black hen. Dad went out and grabbed her by the neck and gave her a few twists and rung it's neck and as the old hen fluttered over in the ground, Bill had tears down both cheeks and he said "Oh, she's gone, she's gone." I can't remember whether he enjoyed the Sunday meal or not but he was really grief stricken at the loss of that old black hen.

I recall another incident with some amusement. There was an old barn just across the alley behind our house and there was a hay loft in the second floor of it and on this one particular occasion we were playing some kind of a game or perhaps for some other reason, someone was chasing me and I ran into this barn and climbed up the ladder to the loft. I was quite a ways ahead of the boy that was chasing me and when I got up there I saw a nest full of chicken eggs. When the chap that was chasing me got his head and shoulders up above the opening in the loft, I let him have it and I hit him right smack in the face with at least six eggs and that was the end of that particular chase.

I would like to say that the person who was chasing me was my brother, Bill, but I don't think that it was. I can't remember who the boy was. I don't think he is probably too fond of eggs, though.

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There wasn't a great deal to do around the small town of Brentford but we did have certain more or less standard passtimes. One was snaring gophers and another was catching pigeons in the lofts of the various barns around the area. I was quite a reader and I had a subscription to "American Boy Magazine." I read in the "American Boy Magazine" how to make a small smokehouse for smoking game, fish, and rabbits, and so on. So I made an effort at building this smokehouse, but I didn't have any game to smoke in it. But I told the other boys about it in our neighborhood gang and we managed to get a couple of pigeons, four of five sparrows and a couple of gophers. We cleaned them very carefully just as I had seen mother clean chickens and game animals at home, and we smoked them in this little smokehouse.

I can't remember how long it took to smoke them nor do I remember anything about the quality of the food, but I do remember that in order to be sure that everyone got a taste of our culinary efforts, we had to hold some of the younger members of the clan while we forced them to eat smoked sparrow, smoked squab and smoked gopher. I don't think that meal has ever been repeated anywhere else.

Some way or another my mother found out about that incident. Although it was too late for her to do anything about it, she rather sternly admonished me not to smoke any more gophers or sparrows and I never did.

Bill and I can both recall that out on the outskirts of town there was a trap shooting range, but it had been abandoned and among the stuff that was left was a little shack that had housed the apparatus that had shot the clay pigeons into the air. It was probably about six feet square or so and maybe five or six feet high. We cut a hole in the roof and found an old stove out at the dump yard and put it in and we got an old bucket and used to hard boil eggs in it. There was a mill right nearby, a feed mill, and there were always all kinds of chickens around this mill. Nobody gathered the eggs regularly, I guess, and we had learned how to tell the fresh ones from the bad ones so we would gather fresh eggs and boil them by the dozens and we enjoyed many and many an afternoon of eating hard-boiled eggs. Most people will say that I am a liar when I tell this story but I have a very clear recollection of having eaten more than 26 hard boiled eggs at one time. There may have been one or two other boys in our group who even exceeded that number.

In this little town of Brentford there was a family that lived down on Main Street in a little one story house. Their name was Stanley. The father's name was Earl and he made his living mostly by working about four head of horses which he owned. He would haul things for people and a lot of times when he didn't have anything to do he would drag the old dirt and gravel roads. There were no hard surface roads in those days.

This was in the 1920's and Earl had one of the loudest voices and one of the largest vocabularies of swear words of about anybody I have ever known. You could hear him cursing at his horses and yelling at them and he cursed them at every step as he dragged roads out along the edge of town. But he had some children and one of them at the time that I am recalling was maybe three years old and would walk up and down this little main street in his little childish gait with wet diapers sagging down around his ankles. He was invariably wet and so the kids around town gave him the name "Bad Water" and this name "Bad Water" stuck with him clear up until he became an adult. I am not sure how long he carried it but I know that all through high school he was known as "Bad Water" Stanley.

Being the oldest in the family I often had the little chore of taking care of some of the younger children and they seem to be fond of telling an incident in which I had charge of Audree when she was a baby, maybe a year and a half or two years old. We had a very fancy baby buggy with woven reed sides and a top that went up and we lived about two blocks from Main Street and there was a sidewalk, a cement sidewalk about four feet wide, very, very straight. It ran in front of our house right down onto Main Street and on this particular occasion I was interested in seeing if it would be possible in rolling that baby carriage right down that sidewalk. I thought that if I got it lined up straight I could see no reason why the carriage wouldn't roll straight so I very carefully lined the wheels up on the center of the sidewalk and aimed it directly straight ahead with the idea that it would be able to go the entire length of the two blocks without going off the side. I give it a little shove, the baby, of course, was still in it and sure enough, my figures were correct. The baby carriage started rolling and it was somewhat downhill so it gained speed. I squatted down and watched it go to be sure that it didn't turn off one side or the other and after it got about 100 feet I took off after it but I wasn't able to catch it before it got to the end of the two block stretch where it went over about an 18 inch curb, crashed into main street, and dumped the baby out into the dirt road. There was no particular damage to anybody except my own rear end after my father found out about it. I can still hear my father exclaiming, "Georgie, I simply can't understand it. I cannot understand it. You must have known that you would dump that baby out and could have hurt it severely." I tried to explain to him what I was doing but he didn't seem to be interested in the scientific aspects of the experiment.

Despite what my wife, Millie, says, I always had a great deal of sympathy for these younger members of our family and always felt badly when they were injured or got into any kind of difficulty. I don't think I ever felt sorrier for my little brother Billy when he was a boy of five or six years old and, of course, I was seven or eight and we had to recite pieces at the village church Christmas event. Mother had taught Bill to say a verse something about "My Mother calls me William, My Father calls me Will, but the fellas call me Bill". Something to that effect. And here he was in a little Lord Fontleroy suit up in front of those people on this little platform and he got about halfway through it and couldn't remember it and he stood there with his lip trembling and the tears came into his eyes. Mother went up and rescued him, picked him up and said that was just fine, and it really was, but it must have been a rather traumatic experience for a small child. I am sure I had a number of similar experiences myself because this business of saying pieces at a Christmas Eve thing at the church went on for many years and I almost always forgot mine.

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Our Dad used to take a great delight in teasing our sister Ruth when Ruth was along in the fifth or sixth grade up until the time she was in high school, as I recall. Dad was quick to tease her about any misuse of words and as I recall one particular time she was reading a little story book to one of the younger children and in it there was a line that said "My great wish. Do not deny it." And Ruth read it out loud within Dad's hearing, "My great wish. Do not denny it" and father laughed and laughed and teased her about that for a long time.

Then there was another occasion in which Ruth was reading the comic strips to one of the children and there was a Catch n' Jammer strip and one of the kids said, "Look out, look out, the bull mooser is coming" and Ruth read it loudly and clearly for the other children "Look out, lookout, the bull, mooser is coming". Father never let her forget about that one either. I think the funniest one was when we had an old silver toned phonograph and we got great use out of that machine. We played it a lot. We got all kinds of records. Everything from Gally Kirtcher, the famous soprano, and Caruso, the famous baritone, down to a lot of comic records. One of the comic records was one that said "Cowan telephones the health department" and this was a man imitating a Yiddish voice and he was calling the health department because his son had swallowed a nickel and he wanted the health department to tell him what to do about it. And he was calling on the telephone, of course, and he said "Hello, Board of Health, Board of Health, I didn't tell you to go no place, I said Board of health." And sister Ruth, in repeating this to some visitors said "Hello, Hello, Board of Health, Board of Health, I didn't tell you to go no place, I said go to hell." Of course, that was the way it sounded but Ruth got it a little bit backwards.

Back in the days of our youth it was common practice on Halloween for the young men of the town to go out and turn over the old wooden outhouses. There was no indoor plumbing at all in that part of the country, not even running water to most of the places. People, of course, depended on these old wooden outhouses and it made them mad when kids would come along and tip them over.

This one particular Halloween I was a boy in high school and I had stayed home with my mother. I can't remember what we were doing but I was helping my mother do something and so I had the very best of testimony, a real good alibi, that I had not been out on the particular Halloween. But the next morning the shoemaker's wife came over to our house to talk to my mother. The shoemaker lived about a block from our house and they had an outdoor toilet that was rather conspicuous. There weren't any other buildings right around and somebody had tipped it over. The lady was telling my mother that she was quite sure that it was George. Well, I happened to be home at the time but I wasn't in the same room, I was in another room, probably in the kitchen and I could hear them talking and my mother said "Well, I am sure it wasn't George because he was home all evening". Well, the shoemaker's wife said "I know it was George. It had to be him." Mother says "How are you so sure?" and the shoemaker's wife said "Well, because the footprints are there and he's got the biggest feet of anyone in town so that's how we know." My mother laughed and told me about it and assured me that I didn't have to worry because I wasn't going to be unjustly accused or punished.

I think one of my earliest recollections involving brother Bill and myself concerns an event that took place in the town of Claremont in the northern part of South Dakota. We lived in Claremont when I started the first grade and I think we must have lived in that town five or six years. Bill, as I said, is about two...two and a half years younger than I and I remember this incident very clearly although there is nothing important at all about it. But mother and dad had gone to some kind of an event that evening where there was a party or lodge, they both belonged to Eastern Star, for what I don't know. But they left us home alone and at that time we lived upstairs over the hardware store that my dad managed in that town and there was an outdoor stairway between two buildings. I recall very clearly that both Billy and I had on pajamas that were union suit type, they had the feet made right into them. Well, we woke up during the middle of the night and we went out the door and down these steps and we both were crying quite loudly, I am sure. I think I was trying to console Billy but we didn't have any idea where our parents were. We knew they weren't home and possibly we thought we could find them if we went out in the street and cried loud enough. Anyway, there we were and sure enough, somebody found us. Possibly he was the local constable or night watchman. Anyway, I remember he gathered us into his arms and someway or another got ahold of our parents and took us home. I think he took us home and then called our parents. In a little town like that, you know, everybody knows everybody, even the kids.

Another childhood memory, we lived at that same place and I would play by myself down in the back behind the hardware store. In those days everything at the hardware store we got in the way of supplies and merchandise came in large wooden packing boxes and there were a lot of packing boxes down there. My dad had them stacked up neatly and I could play in there quite safely. But, on this one occasion, I found a little garter snake about a foot long and I wasn't scared of him. I don't know. I think it must have been the first snake I ever saw. I picked him up and rolled him into a nice little coil and stuck him into the breast pocket. I had on a sort of a pair of coveralls that had little pockets over each chest. So I put this snake in there and I scampered up the stairs. I think I was maybe four or five years old. My mother was alone upstairs and when I got up there I said "See what I got, mother" and pointed to this pocket. She could see something wriggling in there and she was petrified. She must have known it was a snake but she didn't want to admit to herself that it was a snake. She says "Oh George, what is it, what is it? It's a frog, it's a toad, oh Georgie, Georgie it isn't a snake is it?" And she let out a squeal and a yip. My dad came running up the stairs, grabbed me and took that pocket and pulled the snake out. Of course, it was just a little garter snake, only about 10 or 12 inches long but he told me never to do that again and I learned then that women are scared of snakes. But little boys aren't.

I can still hear my dad telling me one of his favorite stories about himself. As I said, Dad ran the lumber yard in this little town of Brentford where we lived and the cashier at the bank was a man named Charley Quiete, a very strong Republican. Dad was always a very strong Democrat. There was a man named Peter Norbeck, the governor of South Dakota, and was running for U.S. Senator and to which job he eventually got elected. He came into the bank and was talking to Charley Quiete and my dad walked in and Charley was about to say "Mr. Norbeck, I would like to have you meet..." About that time Norbeck turned around and saw my dad and he says "Well, Billy Phillips, you old son-of-a-gun" which took the wind out of Charley's sails because it turned out that my dad and Mr. Norbeck were longtime friends, going clear back to the days that my dad ran a livery stable out along the Missouri River."