WLM
| history
‘Medicine Bow’ and ‘Wyoming’ (where
the Cruickshank family lived). The
Power House was painted ‘El. 6640,’
providing important elevation information for the pilots
when departing. The use of the
house for the family came with
employment, at the cost of
$20 a month. Each house had
two bedrooms, a small kitchen ‘with built in cupboards,’
dining room and living room
combined. Indoor plumbing
was an exciting advancement
for the young family, and one
‘very small’ bathroom included hot and cold running water.
Most impressive to Betty was
the linen closet, noting “…we had never
had a linen closet in our other homes.”
The boys slept in the unfinished attic
during the winter months, and the basement in the summer months. Betty and
Evelyn shared one of the two bedrooms,
and the family struggled to stay quiet
while their father attempted to sleep
during the day as he typically worked a
night shift.
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A coal burning cook stove was used, and
the basement contained an enclosed coal
room that helped control the dust. The
family made the most of everything,
even saving the ashes from the burned
coal to spread onto ice in the winter. “By
today’s standards it was a very small
house, but to us it was a castle!” Betty
writes.
The children were required to take part
in the family chores. A government issued General Electric Refrigerator with
the motor on top of the device lived in
the unfinished basement, and the children fought over whose turn it was to
complete the constant chore of bringing
up and taking down food. The
washing area also resided in
the basement, and as there was
no drain, the boys’ job included carrying the water upstairs
and throwing it into a nearby
field. “Mom would frequently
leave pennies in the washer for
the boys,” Betty writes. “If two
of them carried the water she
left two pennies or if the three
of them did the work she left
three pennies.”
As the home was government
owned, it came with the responsibility
of upkeep. “{T}he floors of the houses
were all hardwood and very beautiful,”
Betty writes. “We were furnished with
a waxing machine, and several times a
year we had to remove the old wax, apply a new coat of Johnson’s floor wax,
and polish the floors.” Surprise inspections by government officials were regular, making sure the floors, stoves, refrigerators and furnaces were being cared