A Slice Of Country Life

Reviewed by Nancy

It all started in the spring of 1902 when the Walker family disembarked from the steam train at McMinnville, Oregon. Lured by colorful advertisements posted by the railroad companies, and magazine and newspaper articles lauding the good life to be found in Oregon, the family left their sod house on the Kansas prairie and started a new life.

In A Slice Of Country Life: 1902-1915 (979.5 WAL Main), George F. Walker tells the story of his family's adventures as the owners of the Buell country store and the 27 acre farm they acquired with it. The store was in the rural community of Buell, Oregon, on the east-west route across the state, midway between Salem, the state capitol, and the coast.

George Walker was four years old when this odyssey began. It is to me astonishing how much things have changed in the last hundred years or so, and George Walker's book drives that point home. The water source for his family was a well about 150 feet from the house. Water was drawn up by a bucket on a rope and carried up a hill to the house. As George puts it, "There was no flush." The restroom facility was an outhouse with a crescent cut in the door, usually equipped with a Sears Roebuck Company catalogue from the previous year "often used down to the slick pages of the harness section." Just ponder that for a moment, and the bathroom in your home will look pretty good.

Mr. Walker relates anecdotes regarding daily life in the store and on the farm, detailing how crops were planted, equipment repaired, and medical problems addressed. To write his book George held the pen with a crooked index finger, the crooked finger being the result of a farming accident. George was feeding corn into a cutting box, a box with two blades inside used to cut up corn for cow feed, when he managed also to feed his hand into the box where it was mangled by the blades.

His mother cleansed the nearly severed finger with turpentine and bandaged it without a splint. It healed, but healed crookedly. In these times, this is hard to imagine. What if I half chopped off a finger in the paper cutter at work and then insisted that we just cleanse it with turpentine and bandage it up rather than going to the doctor? The workman's comp people would have a fit. And I imagine library management might want to send me somewhere for mental evaluation.

Mr. Walker relates the story of his first viewing of an automobile and his first ride in that automobile. He also provides details about rural social life, card and parlor games that were played at get-togethers, and the excitement that was brought about when Mr. Nathan Blair, a member of the community, bought a deluxe model Edison phonograph. A date was set for a party at the local school, and Mr. Blair provided music with his phonograph.

When Mr. Walker was twelve years old, advance men for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show came to Buell to put up advertising posters. In exchange for allowing them to display the posters in the Buell country store, the advance men gave Mr. Walker's father two tickets to the event which was to take place in Salem. Compared to the tiny crossroads of Buell, Salem was a metropolis, located twenty-five or thirty miles away.


George and his older brother, Clarence, rose early the morning of the Wild West Show. By six A.M. they had finished their farm chores. They then rode their bikes twelve miles to the town of Dallas, where they left their bikes at a livery stable (yes, I said livery stable. If you're so young you don't know what a livery stable is, look it up.) After stabling the bikes, they boarded a train for the remainder of the trip to Salem. Not only was this George's first circus and Wild West Show, it was his first ride on a train as well.

Mr. Walker is a great storyteller, and it is fortunate for the rest of us that he decided to write A Slice Of Country Life.