Lately since brother Bob is gone I find myself comparing our early life with that of the three younger Rudin boys. They were just about a year apart while Bob was two year and three months older than me. So Bob was always boss, and he would wake up in the morning with a plan for the day. I never questioned his plans. 

 The Rudin boys had a pony which they took turns riding, and so did we. There was a sheep farmer that used to pasture his flock on a brushy side hill across the road and the creek from the Rudin farm. Sunday mornings he would put a small sack of salt in his pocket and come over to the farm and ask the Rudin kids to go up on the hill and bring the sheep down where he could see and count and then give them the salt. He usually gave them a quarter which they saved and eventually bought a second hand bike which they still had to take turns riding. 

 The man that owned the farm where we lived loved to have lots of horses around. There was a team of old fat mares wandering around the buildings. Dad didn't even fence them in. Someone said they were retired fire horses. 

 When I was riding the pony, Bob would sometimes lead Nell or Pet to something high enough that he could get up on and crawl over on the horses back. When she thought Bob had ridden long enough she knew where there was an apple tree with a limb just the right height to walk under and scrape Bob off.

 Some farmers thought that habit of salting their sheep or young stock was old fashioned or too much trouble and would put out a block of salt and not go near them for quite some time. This would work alright till it came time to bring them in for the winter or to sell them. Then if they hadn't seen any humans for some time, they would act like wild animals. 

 By this time the kids had all grown to be old enough to have a riding horse of their own and most of them had become expert riders. One of these farmers with cattle that had gone wild would call Fritz's older brother, Louie, who had his own cattle truck. They would load a couple horses and maybe get some other fellows to help and away they would go. Some cattle they could rope, some they would have to ride alongside and bulldog down and get a rope on them and get them in the truck that way. Once in a while an animal would have become so wild the only way they could get them would be to shoot them.

 There was a sale barn on the farm where Fritz's Dad held an auction every week. There was a good sized corral along the bar and they would put on a rodeo there Sunday afternoons. There were quite a few young fellows that had riding horses and some of them would travel quite some distance to come to compete. There were no prizes,  everything was for fun. There were bleachers to sit on and we used to see some real expert riding. 

 There was a young fellow that they announces as Joe Loson, suppose to be part Indian who Fritz said was pure Polish. He would start from about where Hahn's garage is now and by the time he had reached the sale barn he would have gone under that running horse's belly and would be back in the saddle. I've seen this done elsewhere but never as slick as he did it.