Grandfather was a life long farmer. He owned several sections of land in the area of Simla, Colorado. Part of the land was tilled and the remainder was pasture. He continued to farm to farm into his eighties. As a teenager, I, George Haddock. spent a couple summers working with John Walter. He was the most honest man I've ever known. If he shook hands on something - it was cast in concrete. He was a hard man in some ways. He was up at 'first light' and other than lunch, he didn't quit until dark. Celia had TB and wasn't able to preform as a healthy wife. After the birth of serval children he wanted a boy so bad he named the third daughter - Willard. The eldest, Ruby, was the little mother of the other children. My mother was the housekeeper and the other children were treated as farm hands. When I was staying with Poppie he expected me to cook breakfast, clean the house and be in the fields before nine. He was still using old animal drawn farming equipment. My cousins and I spent sitting on the back of this team drawn equipment. I learned a great deal about Poppie. As a youth he feel in love with a prostitute once told me that my grandmother was almost a prostitute. He ha an uncanny ability to work with Jackasses (jacks). He once contracted a job to haul some timber and agreed to be at this man's house at first light, but the man wasn't awake, much less ready to work. This made Poppie so mad that he knocked the man out and left. One interesting story was that as a young man he saw a flying suacer. He had been working a team of 'Jacks' in southern Missouri, an area of rolling hills. He said he saw a shadow pass over him, looked up and saw a lorge object passing overhead. He described it as loking like a very large stainless steel ball bearing. It apeared to land a couple of hills away, but he couldn't leave as the 'Jacks' had spooked and attempted to flee in different directions. This happened in the 1880s so I asked about a hot air ballonn . He corrected me with "I know what a balloon looks like and it was going much too fast, as fast as a car".
Died at 18 days old