The Buzby Family -- An Alaska Pioneer Family
Bob and Tiny Buzby Interview - page 2
BB: My life began when we got the dairy because delivering milk in bottles to houses was the way it was done. There were three dairies in Fairbanks of which we were one of them. The usual thing was delivered with a horse and wagon in summer and sled in winter, and eventually we had a vehicle as well and that was a good vehicle, a 1914 Dodge. (laughs)
TB: They had hay in the sled and blankets over the top and everything and heaters around so that it [the milk] stayed warm.
KP: Question on size of cowherd?
BB: Oh, I don't know. We always had about a dozen milking, and we were always raising a few. One incident which might not be of interest to some people but it was to me, we had a bull that was Jersey and not the petting kind, and my dad was riding a horse, driving the cattle in and this bull gored the horse, right in the chest. Upended him, and knocked my dad of course ended up on the ground. I had the ability or the privilege, what ever you want to call it; I killed that bull the next day. The remedy for such a thing as that, my dad went in and got a part of a sack of flour and filled that wound in the horse with flour, and that was probably a couple of months before that horse was usable . . . but he did recover.
I never knew, of course nobody would have suspected, that that accident with the bull throwing my dad off the horse and as a result of it he had a stroke about two weeks after that. It may have been the cause of the stroke. But anyway, after my dad died, we sold the dairy. There was a family in Nome that had a cow and they got a lot of our bottles. You might find a Buzby bottle in Nome yet today.
Naturally with that many head of cattle, we had to raise a lot of hay. That was always part of my job. My brother, I only had one brother that was born in Alaska, two years older than I was. He worked in town for money. He worked at the NC Company for a number of years. My oldest brother was agent at Manley Hot Springs for the NC Company for, eight years, I think.
In 1931, when I drove my dogs hauling mail from Nenana and I always left Nenana with 800 pounds, and I had nine dogs. My job was hauling mail as far as Ruby, and then the airplanes were getting into action, and they'd pick up the mail from there. I had a wheelbarrow-load of Sears Roebuck catalogs that I'd drop off at Ruby and they'd pick em up to take em the rest of the way.
BB: Homesteads then was 320 acres. This part here is where our home was. (indicating map)
KP: So the house was right there by the river. Discussion of where Richardson Hwy was.
BB: Actually, the road . . . this part here was in field. The slough came in right below our home. We always had a fishnet in there. That was a normal thing, those days.
KP: Question re house itself.
BB: It was a log house, you would find nowadays, it's probably a three-room equivalent. It was one, with another one added on, typical.
KP: Your dad built that, your brothers helped him build it . . . ?
BB: My dad and I were the dairymen. My mother of course took care of the milk once it got in the house. I did the delivering. We sold cream by the pint, and butter, and eggs, and the usual.
KP: Where was the barn in relation to the house and other buildings?
BB: Log house. Barn was not fastened to the house. One barn for the chickens and another one for the cattle.
KP: Was it your sister who married the Spencer, which was also an adjacent property?
BB: Yes, he filed on a piece between us, between the Joy home and my dad's place. Naturally, that was two miles from town, that was along ways out, and the ladies used to come out and commiserate with my mother for having to live so far from town.
TB: You had to be a pretty dedicated person to be willing to do that. And she was.
Tell her about the big mill they had for processing the wheat and making flour.
BB: That was history, I guess. They had the flourmill shipped into Fairbanks and my mother to decorate the system. She took wheat from the first that the flourmill was able to make and she made little loaves of bread, I don't know, several hundred of them probably, for whoever wanted them, just to show they could do it. And of course my dad always had a good garden and the family always had garden forever.
KP: What type of produce were you growing in the garden?
BB: All of it. All the hardy vegetables. And we had a greenhouse. Tomatoes and cucumbers and lettuce, stuff like that in the greenhouse.
KP: Did you sell that in town, also, like you did with the dairy products?
BB: Sold it to anybody that wanted it. And there was the first fairs my dad was one of the principal people involved in having one. I remember one little incident there that wouldn't be any fun for anybody else, but he took some of the dairy cattle to the fair and they had a butcher doing the judging. Made my dad mad and he took the cows home!