Of course we have albums, and many boxes of pictures which we have recently sorted, so looking at the early pictures of childhood might give me some clue for a start.

Here is one of Bob Evans and I sitting at a child's table on chairs bought by my mother from the new T. Eaton's catalog.



My little sister is having tea and playing cards with us as well. The year is about 1928/29. We still have two of those little chairs.

Right behind us was a twelve by sixteen foot Yukon cabin with a floor and walls up the sides about four feet high, made of rough lumber. The rest of the walls and roof were a white canvas tent. This was the home of my grandfather, by his preference.



John Vincent Finch was born in 1850 in the Eastern United States. As a young man and a logger he ended up in California in the Redwoods, then north to Washington State and the big timber of the Hoods Canal. He married Ida Robbins and they had a family of 5 boys and one girl.





In 1898 he headed north to Skagway and the Chilcoot Pass, down Lake Bennett and eventually to Dawson City. As my sister put on his headstone many years later - 'Nor-westering'. His days of traveling north were over.



In 1913, having bought ten acres of land (sight unseen) on the east bench of Penticton, he settled there to grow fruit trees. He was not alone in this venture as he had four other buddies from the Yukon that I know of - Cabel Hauser, John Helslie, John LaHore and Mutch. These men were hard workers and extremely inventive when they had so much work to do, and so little in the way of machinery to help them get the jobs done.



The biggest thing that had to be provided was the water system, and this, I believe, was the responsibility of the Land Company that sold the property. They had to pick up the water from the mouth of Penticton Creek above Penticton in the Carmi, and run it in open metal flumes all the way to Four Mile with a spillway into the small creek bed at that point.

Some of my earliest memories are tagging along behind my father while he was 'chasing water', which meant trying to guide the water down dirt ditches to the last trees at the bottom of the hill. This usually meant several trips up and down to adjust the flow or plug a gopher hole into which the water was disappearing.



The domestic water for the living quarters for the winter months had to be provided for. In the early days there was no electricity and no such thing as the pumps we have today.

It must have been sometime around 1930 that we got power, but I could be wrong about that, because I remember cleaning lamp shades and trimming the wick. But that could have been in 1935 when the power lines from Trail were down for about six weeks.

I digress. Back to the water. To provide domestic water it was necessary to built cisterns, twleve feet in diameter and fourteen feet in depth b elow ground level. I believe they used the chimney brick with the inside heavily mortared to water proof the tank. If you had a hill near your abode you could use a gravity feed and pipe under ground to give a pressurized tap in the house.

The cisterns had to have a weatherized top. This is where a good man with a shovel came in.

It might be worth mentioning that my father, Sid, had a set of pipe threaders for pipe from 3/8 inch to 2 1/2 inch iron piping. He must have learned this trade in his birthplace in Shelton Washington because some eighty years later the village officials got him to show them where the old ipe lines were situated.

Those people who could not use a gravity system had to put in a hand pump, which had to be thawed and primed each morning in cold weather.


Dad was about five foot ten in height, and weighed about one hundred and eighty pounds. His father, Vincent, was about the same size, but they were both extremely strong, and what they lacked in size they more than made up for in savvy.

My father was in his eighties when he came to live with us on the Cawston bench. Part of the property had some large rocks imbedded at ground level which could weight around half a ton. For something to do he would use his knowledge of simple tools like a shovel and a crowbar and the simple principle of the fulcrum point and leverage that was applied.

This prinicple regarding the use of the advantage of pries and the proper fulcrum point comes back to me now, and I recall when I had my own eighteen wheeler many years later in the 1980's I had a crew of 3 or 4 husky young men, and we had just finished loading a 20 ton load of baled hay. Unbeknownst to us the truck was parked over an old septic tank, and as we finished loading the dueled tandems fell through the top of the tank.

The young men couldn't see any way out of the predicament short of unloading the trailer or hiring a large loader to lift it free. However, there was a log lying in the yard, some 10 inches in diameter and 20 feet long. With the combined weight of the six men and the proper fulcrum point we lifted the trailer high enough to put planks under the tires and drove away.

The young men were suitably impressed.