Once when Clabe Wilson had been hunting, he brought home two young squirrel kits in his pockets. They must have been orphaned as they came readily to him. The Wilsons fed them raw oatmeal and milk.

“My, the kids sure think lots of them and, of course, Dad does, too,” his wife Leora wrote their Navy boys, “and I guess I do, too.” Clabe fixed a box for them and they became family entertainment. The bigger one didn’t last long, maybe from overeating. 

They named the survivor Rusty. He hid nuts and other small things in the door of the sewing machine cabinet. He’d grab the pencil or pen from someone writing a letter, and scamper away with it.   

Clipping from The [Dexter] Sentinel, Sept. 19, 1934

“‘Rusty,’ a recently acquired pet squirrel, is quite the most important member of the Wilson family in Dexter. The boys found the tiny fellow nearly starved, apparently an orphan, so they brought the hungry baby home, fed him bread and milk, and how he has thrived on these rations. He is especially fond of peaches and will also eat all the bread and butter you will offer him. He climbs all over anyone who will pick him up, nosing into pockets and sleeves in search of any hidden crumbs of food. He is quite the cutest pet we have seen in some time.”

Clabe and daughter Doris, then a teenager, took the Model T truck to gather black walnuts in the timber near Bear Creek. They brought home the load and dried it in the yard before attempting to husk them. Although Rusty began to spend less time with the family, he showed up when Doris cracked walnuts on the back step, and helped himself to the ones she’d already managed to open.

Doris was my mother. Her taste for black walnuts came from those Depression Era days. 

Clabe had pulled the top off the Model T truck, calling it their “roadster.” He sold it in late 1934 and the family had no automobile until a job as a tenant farmer in 1939 brought them out of poverty.

Leora Wilson took this photo in late 1934 to send to their “Navy boys,” Delbert and Donald, who enlisted early that year. Clabe, Dale, Danny, Junior, and Rusty.

Nelly Murariu used the photo in cover artwork for Leora’s Dexter Stories. I like the way it turned out. I bet the Wilson family would be surprised, and probably pleased as well.

Nelly Murariu of PixBeeDesign has designed the covers for all of the “Leora books” and also Meadowlark Songs. She also lays out the interiors, and for the ebooks as well.