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.. KLEM IRAD SCHNEIDER: A
Personal History
Additional Information: EXCERPTS
Chapter 1, Lewisville, page 1 Lewisville, Idaho, is a rural town. Its population, 550 in 1995, has probably changed little since I was born there in 1941. The original settlers were Mormons from Utah, who arrived July 10, 1882, to homestead farms. They laid out the town with wide streets that were square with the compass and having square blocks in the typical Mormon fashion. The settlement was called Lewisville because the nearby river was then called the Lewis River in honor of Captain Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. . . .
Lewisville had two classes of citizens – farmers and non-farmers. A farmer's status in the community was directly proportional to two things – the size of his farm and the appearance of his farm. The more acres in his farm, the greater the farmer's stature; and the bigger and better his equipment (tractors, machinery, buildings) and the better his crops and animals looked, the greater his stature. The appearance of crops and animals was a subjective judgment, but the size of the farm and the size of the tractor could be measured exactly in acres and dollars. The more important people were the ones with the most acres and the biggest tractors. . . . We burned coal in the kitchen stove. Fire was started in the stove each time cooking was done. Crumpled newspapers were placed in the bottom of the firebox. Kindling made by splitting pieces of boards with an axe into strips no wider than half an inch were placed on the newspapers, and coal was placed on the kindling. The newspaper was ignited with a match from a matchbox fastened to the door molding next to the stove. It took about ten minutes to make a fire hot enough to cook, not counting time to chop kindling and fetch coal. Once a week someone removed ashes and soot from the firebox and discarded them on the ash pile in the back yard. Coal, covered with a canvas tarp in the winter to keep snow off, was stored in a pile in the back yard, and some was stored in a coal bucket next to the stove. Once a year coal was delivered by a dump truck. Next to the coal pile in the back yard was the woodpile composed of scraps of lumber in a heap with a section of tree trunk nearby for a chopping block. There was usually a double bitted axe stuck in the chopping block. Chapter One, Lewisville, page 7 In 1954 the Ford stopped running permanently, and we junked it. Father then bought a 1935 Chevrolet pickup. The body of the pickup was in worse condition than that of the Ford, but the engine ran well. However, it would not run very fast. We usually drove it below thirty-five mph (Again an estimate, the speed-o-meter did not work.). I tried twice [when I was fourteen years old] to see how fast it would go. When it got to about fifty mph, the externally mounted radiator began to boil, and steam blew from the radiator cap, swept back, and condensed on the windshield. This was in the winter, and the windshield wipers did not work, so the water froze on the windshield and blocked my view of the road. The pickup was probably black originally, but the paint was badly faded, and the original color was not discernable. It was mostly brown from rust when we had it. The floor of the bed was made of boards. We hauled cows in it a number of times, and one of them stomped a hole in the wooden floor. We patched the hole by nailing a board over it. The original fuel tank was no longer in use, presumably because it leaked. Before we acquired the truck, a new fuel tank had been installed under the seat. To fill the tank, the seat had to be removed to provide access to the fuel cap. The seat rested on the top of the fuel tank. The fuel gauge was in the top of the fuel tank, so the seat also had to be removed to check the fuel level. I often ran out of gas. The windshield was hinged at the top and could be opened four inches with a crank on the dashboard. The heater and defroster did not work. There was no radio. I do not recall ever seeing any tread on the tires; they were always bald. The farthest we ever drove it was to Idaho Falls two or three times, which was half an hour trip from Lewisville at thirty-five mph. It served us well when we were on the farm in Annis and for a time thereafter….
Chapter Two, Fire Fighting, page 70 In the lava flow, in the distance, a thin column of dark smoke rose. We each took a canteen, a box of rations, and a shovel, except Dell, who took a pulaski. We hiked into the lava flow toward the smoke, single file, with Dell in the lead. The day was bright, sunny, cloudless, and hot. The ground was mostly lava rock, bumpy and uneven. Dell picked a way around and over mounds of lava. We had to be cautious about where we stepped to avoid stumbling. Among the rocks were scant patches of shallow, sandy soil in which sparse clumps of grass grew. Numerous scrub juniper trees and a few sagebrush bushes were rooted in the lava. We arrived at the fire after an hour of steady hiking. The fire was smoldering in duff accumulated beneath juniper trees. It was spreading slowly through duff in cracks and crevices in the lava and through sparse grass. When it reached a tree, the tree would flare in a large flame for a minute or two until the leaves were consumed, leaving a blackened skeleton. Sometimes fire would continue to smolder in trunks or branches of trees. When we arrived, about an acre had burned. Dell and Larry showed the rest of us what to do. Kenneth, Arnold, and I had no training or experience in fire fighting. This on-the-job training was our first…. We asked Dell the obvious question about this fire. Why did it have to be put out? Chapter Five, Aviation, page 208
…I had not flown a [Cessna]152 for years, so I got an instructor to do a check ride with me in a 152. We did two stalls and some touch-and-goes. He said I was approved to fly the 152 and had me let him out at the tie-down area. I took off and went to the practice area near the lakeshore west of Farmington to do some more maneuvers. I was practicing stalls at 3,000 feet above ground. I had the nose in a high nose-up attitude with power off when the airplane suddenly yawed and banked to the left. I could feel the seat twisting under me. The terrain suddenly spun to the right. I knew immediately what was happening – the airplane was in a spin. It was spinning around its left wing tip with the inner wing below stall speed and the outer wing above stall speed. If this situation were to continue, the airplane would rapidly spiral downward until it impacted the ground. Four things flash in my mind instantaneously – try to stay oriented, try to recall what to do from flight training twenty-three years previously, Linda will not be pleased, and I will be humiliated posthumously when the people at the airport learn Schneider has killed himself in a spin. Chapter Six, Arrival in Vietnam, page 240 The flight arrived in Saigon about 9:00 AM Vietnam time on July 12, 1971. Total flight time was nineteen hours. The sky was cloudy, and after the airplane descended through the clouds, we were low enough to see clearly the trees in the jungle and to see the rice paddies with an occasional road cutting through them. As the airplane approached the city for landing at Ton Sun Nhut Airport, I could see the city streets of Saigon congested with traffic that was mostly military vehicles. I was impressed with the run down, shabby appearance of the buildings, most of which needed paint and many of which had corrugated metal roofs. The airplane taxied off the runway and along a taxiway lined with bunkers and rolled past an aircraft ramp where high walls of sand bags had been erected to shield aircraft from explosions of incoming enemy rockets and mortars. |
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