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Tom Ross

Tom Ross' column appears Tuesdays and Sundays in Steamboat Today. Contact him at 970-871-4205 or tross@SteamboatToday.com.

I'm not certain what came over me last week, but I crafted a homemade Valentine's Day card for my mother. In the process, I felt like a little boy all over again.

While my sisters and I were growing up, my mom was wise enough to keep a rainy day box filled with fabric scraps, wallpaper samples, old buttons and construction paper. If school was out for the summer and the weather was bad, the instant art projects that grew out of that box kept us from driving her to distraction.

In typical fashion, I put off mailing the Valentine to my mother until the last possible hour this week. As I write this on Friday, it has yet to arrive in Madison, Wis. Luckily, Mom loves me for almost all of my traits.

When I was done gluing together the scraps of paper and old photographs that came together to make her Valentine, I pulled one of my treasured possessions out of a cupboard.

The green three-ring binder is nothing special, but it contains 76 postcards. Most of the cards are addressed to my paternal grandmother, Miss Mildred Slayton (Ross), and a handful is addressed to her sister, Miss Mabel Slayton.

The Slayton girls were the daughters and granddaughters of pioneers who homesteaded a ranch in Central Oregon. The old Slayton place is just three miles east of the little town of Prineville, where Ochoco Creek and the Crooked River flow on their way to the Deschutes and on to the mighty Columbia.

Most of the postcards in my grandmother's collection were printed to celebrate a holiday or a birthday. Among them are three Valentine's Day cards. They are simply addressed to Miss Mildred Slayton, Prineville, Ore. No address, no rural route, no zip code.

During the first decade of the 20th century, Prineville must have looked a great deal like Craig did in the same era. The juniper trees in Central Oregon grow taller than they do in Northwest Colorado, and the massive volcanic peaks of the Cascades would overshadow the Bears Ears north of Craig. But otherwise, the landscape is similar.

Mildred was born June 23, 1896, and Mabel was born Sept. 9, 1897.

When my grandmother and great-aunt were growing up, there was no telephone in the ranch house. If there was important news of a distant relative, it arrived via the telegraph office. There was no radio for entertainment,, and the Slaytons didn't have a car. If they wanted to visit friends, they saddled a horse or hitched one to the buggy.

In fact, every school day, they drove the buggy three miles into town to attend high school and left the horse at the livery stable until the final bell rang and it was time to go home and do chores.

One morning, the two sisters encountered a rattlesnake in the road on their way to school. Mildred got out and dispatched it, hanging its limp body from the struts of the buggy canopy (probably to impress a boy). But that's another story.

As I contemplated the cards this week, their sparse hand-written greetings and the 1-cent postage stamps they bore, it occurred to me that holiday cards served a different purpose in 1910 than they do today. In 1910, sending a holiday postcard was the equivalent of calling friends and family on the phone just to stay in touch.

My favorite card in my grandmother's Valentine collection was printed in Germany. Although it was addressed to her, it contained no personal message.

The illustration on the front of the card says it all. It depicts two cupids, one of them stoking a coal-fired stove in the shape of a large red heart.

I'm confident that Mildred received the card years before she ever met my grandfather. And that's a little troubling to me. It's strange to realize some unknown dude was hitting on your grandma almost 100 years ago.

Happy Valentine's Day, Mom.

- To reach Tom Ross, call 871-4205 or e-mail tross@steamboatpilot.com