Paulina Loughlin - Ebenezer
"We had a big tom cat named Ebenezer. We lived in a house in town. It had a full basement, but it was opened out on the front porch. The cat usually went out there to poop! The basement door had a little lock on it. I went down to put coal in the furnace. I went to get out and the door was locked. The cat had evidently wanted to come down there and unintentionally hit that lock. Anyway, I pounded on the door and I could hear the kids laughing, but nobody came. I tried to get them, and nobody came at all. The cat wasn’t there either. I don’t know where in the heck he was. Anyway, the kids there wouldn’t open that door, and I finally had to go through the coal room and climb over the coal and take off the coal shoot door and climb out in the snow. And then I got around. The kids had been told repeatedly never to open the door to strangers. They would not open the door. I would’ve liked to kill both of them…and the cat!"
Paulina Loughlin - Basque Neighbor
When we lived in Boise, we had some Basque neighbors. They are good people, but they are different. This one guy – he was a herder, he was never home, but his wife was always home. I can’t remember – he had a first name. She took all the kids in the neighborhood bread and jelly whenever they were over there playing. They were always over there playing. She had a pan about this big around and about that thick she baked her bread in. She’d dump it out on a board. She’d pick the board up and hold it up under her chin like this. She had a butcher knife that looked like it could kill elephants. She always cut it like this. I thought oh my - She was a big breasted lady - oh my god, she is going to have trouble, but she never did.
Interviewer: That’s how she cut it?
Paulina: That’s the way she cut it
Interviewer: She put the board up by her chin and she cut it. Almost like playing a fiddle.
Paulina: Well, yeah, but the bread would be on the board and she cut up toward her chin."
Paulina Loughlin - Good Hand
Paulina: I had 11 brothers and sisters, and I was number 2. My mother wasn’t an airhead, but she was prone to go ‘Aaah’ when things went wrong.
Interviewer: So, she didn’t handle stress very well?
Paulina: No, and this particular time, my older sister and I were gone. I had two brothers that were about 3 years apart. We lived 5 miles out of town. One brother very obligingly laid his hand on the chopping block. And the other brother, very obligingly cut his finger off. Mom had brains enough – there was a little store about a block away from the house way out in the country out of Boise Idaho. She sent a kid over to get somebody to drive her to town. She had brains enough even though she was kind of a scatter-head to hold a finger onto the stub until they got to the hospital. That kid to this day has got a good hand, and that was 1945, I guess. That was quite a thing!