I Wanna Be Just Like Dad - Behind the Barn!

One late summer or perhaps late fall, the timing isn't so important as is the story I'm about to tell:

This is a picture of the most
common milk separator sold
during the 1920's.  Frank
Lambert may have used one
just like this.

Frank Houser finished his childhood chores.  It was the one consisent chore that he was able to do since he was the youngest. Frank would heft and carefully, without spilling any, poor the fresh batch of milk over the edge of the seperator's top bin. He would then start turning the crank over and over seperating the milk into two buckets; one side filled with cream, the other side with skim milk.  He would do this over and over until finally he finished the 240 gallons of milk produced each day from the 35 or so cows on the ranch.

Frank wanting to be 'grown-up' and like his father (now, what small boy didn't want to be like their dad?) decided to participate in one of his dad's passions:

Frank looks around the ranch.  Aha, there it is, some old newspaper.  He sneaks a section of it from the house.  He takes the newspaper in hand, goes out back, and gathers a smal handfull of dried weeds.  He walks briskly, looking around to make sure no one saw where he was going, or what he was about to do, behind the barn.  Frank lays and flattens the newspaper down.  He takes a small handful of the dried weeds and carefully arranges them in the middle of the newspaper.  He carefully, but quickly starts rolling the dried weeds up inside the newspaper - creating a small rolled up newspaper cylinder.

Frank holds the roll of newspaper out for inspection, making sure it was rolled tight enough. He then peers at each end, making sure they were just perfectly flat on each end.  Aahh, it passes his visible test, now he's ready.

He places one end in his mouth, and then quickly strikes a match.  Once the spark of flame takes off at the end of the match, he takes that orange flame at the end of the match and places it to the opposite end of the newspaper roll.  He starts to suck the air in through the newspaper roll, just as he's seen his dad do hundreds of times before.  He sucks harder through the newspaper roll, as the other end starts starts instantly glowing flaming ochre-red.  Then the flame crackles to life, the 'cigarette' lights up, just like his dad - all grown up.

Suddenly his father, Frank Morrison, comes around the barn, just in time to see his young boy with a flaming, smoking, homemade cigarette in his mouth.  Frank Lambert quickly tries to put his cigarette out as his father angrly gets closer and closer.The 'cigarette' is just about out by the time his father reaches Frank, however, not all the way.  His father hastily takes the 'cigarette' from Frank and snuffs it out all the way as Frank tries to get away unscathed from his father's anger.

Frank Lambert received a paddling that day, right there behind the barn, in the place where he tried to be 'grown -up'.  His father's anger was justly so.  How dare Frank risk lighting a flame when the barn could so easily become engulfed in flame.  A barn filled with straw and hay, the ranch's 'bread and butter'.

That day taught Frank a lesson we are all thankful for today.  For the rest of Frank's life, even before he felt it was morally wrong, he never had the desire to smoke - again.