AT Shorts: Eating the Brined Jackrabbit
Eating jackrabbit, killing the car battery by listening to the radio, and riding the rails over the flooded Santa Cruz River to school. In this edited clip from Archive Tucson, Trinidad Padilla tells of growing up in the--now ghost town--of Sasco, Arizona.
VO: Sasco, Arizona is about 45 miles northwest of Tucson. Today, it's gone, but in the 1930s, it was the landscape of Trinidad Padilla's childhood.
PADILLA: On our ranch, I mean on my uncle's ranch, we really didn't have that much to do except take care of the cows and milk cows and ride horses. And that was my love, was horses.
VO: After the untimely death of his parents, Trinidad lived with his aunt and uncle on their small ranch outside of the former copper town.
PADILLA: We tried to grow a lot of things there, but we had no running water to irrigate with, so we had to depend on rain or floods, and they didn't come very often. So mainly, we used to shoot rabbits, jack rabbits, and we'd eat some of that. But my aunt was number one on that kind of stuff. What she would do, she'd kill them one day, and then she would take the skin and clean them up and cut them up and put them in water, and put salt in them and leave them overnight. And that next day, before she prepares it, she would take it out and wash it real good and take all that salt water off of it, and then it would taste just like chicken. She'd make it in different ways sometimes, chili or sauce or whatever. We had no refrigeration, no electricity, so we couldn't keep anything for very long because it would spoil or something like that.
At the ranch, my aunt had a huge radio that worked on an automobile six-volt battery. So every evening, I would take the battery out of a little pickup that she had out there and I'd put it on the radio. And I would sit right next to it hearing the cowboy music from Clint, Texas and all from over there.
And the next day, I put the battery back on the truck, and it wouldn't run. But I was smart, you know. I parked the truck before I took the battery out, and there was a little hill right there by the house and I always parked it right there. So I put the battery and just let it coast down and put it in gear and get it started and let the truck charge the battery. And the next day, I'd do the same thing.
We had to go to Red Rock to go to school. And they had a little Model T bus. And then when there was rain or there was a flood, that bus couldn't go because it was just all mud. But there was the railroad then. And they had a car that ran on the tracks. And they would pick us up and take us in that to Red Rock until the floods took the railroad away and then there was no railroad, so that's when they had to build a little school there in Sasco where the ranches were.
The owner of the ranch was JC Kinney. And he gave permission that they could use their bunkhouse for schools for the day, and the night the cowboys would sleep there. Finally, they built a school. So that was from first grade on up to eighth grade, I think. It was one teacher who had the whole school, which of course was about 15 kids, the kids that come from the closest ranches. And mostly, the kids were from working families. They stayed there till they grew up and either got married or something like that, and then they left for town. Nobody went back. And they're all gone.
VO: Trinidad went on to serve as a combat engineer in New Guinea and the Philippines during World War II, returning to Sasco only briefly before his life went on in other directions. To hear the rest of this and other oral histories from the University of Arizona Libraries, visit www.archivetucson.com.