11

American ranchers
May, 1957
St. James, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

12

And one of them was: he came home from work, he looked tired and, I said "Dad, can I go horseback riding?" And, ah so he fished in his pocket and he said, "Well how much is it?" And I said, "A dollar fifty." And he said, "Well, I only have eighty-five cents". And I said "Well, it's seventy-five cents for half an hour, and I can buy a coke with the ten cents." So he gave me it. And another thing he used to do was, when we had moved away, is we used to drive down to see my brother in North Dakota University and ah, there were people that had horses along the way. And I say "Can we stop?! Can we stop?!" And I was twelve, I wasn't, you know, even little. And we pulled into two different American farmsteads. And both those people got out a saddle and bridle and saddled and bridled - one was a pony and the other was a horse. And they said come back anytime and they let me ride. One fellow took me out for an hour on the pony, said how would you like to break the pony? But I think, you know, one of the wonderful things was that my dad had the nerve to go where he didn't know the people and say my daughter's just wondering if she can look at your horses, she loves horses. And if he hadn't taken that step then I wouldn't have had a chance to do that.

Yeah.

Yeah, and it taught me something about people too and I always liked Americans after that.