Friday, January 23, 1981 HODGE – By sharing tasks and shaving costs, the 13 members of the Theron Egg family are cutting the cost of living in half on their desert farm near Barstow.
“Somehow manage, but it’s still hard to make ends meet,” said 37-year-old Carol Egg, who cans home-grown vegetables and fruits and sews most of the clothing her children wear.
Her husband, Theron, 43, an English teacher at Barstow High School, has converted the former square dance hall that adjoins their modest home into five bedrooms for their nine children.
He now is building a still to help cut fuel costs by converting corn into alcohol to power the family automobile.
The children help with the tasks at home and earn some money working on odd jobs. They raised seven pigs for Hinkley 4-H Club projects last year, earning up to $160 that went mostly for clothing.
Mrs. Egg said the family trims costs by buying a lot of their food in bulk, including flour, sugar, oats and wheat. She said she grinds oats into cereal, and wheat for the bread she bakes.
They also trim expenses by gathering firewood for the Franklin stove that warms the main house, and by heating water during the summer with a solar heating system on the roof.
Ashes from the fireplace, along with manure from the chicken yard, help fertilize the sideyard garden, Egg said.
The half-acre plot produces tomatoes, corn, squash, eggplant, radishes, onions, green pepper and pumpkins.
And a nearby orchard supplies apples, pears, plums, peaches and apricots.
Mrs. Egg cans the vegetables and fruits to fill the family larder for the winter, and dries Thompson seedless grapes from vines to make raisins.
Chickens laid from one to two dozen eggs daily last summer to supplement oatmeal at the breakfast table, she said. A new brood lays fewer now, but is expected to increase production soon.
“In a lot of ways, we’re self-sufficient,” Egg said. “You might say we’ve gone back to the earth since moving here from Barstow in 1973.”
The family moved to the 11½-acre site, once occupied by the Slow Pokes Square Dance Hall, from an overcrowded home in Barstow.
“We not only wanted a larger place so we could share it with Grandpa (93-year-old Andrew Iverson) and my mother-in-law, Stella Egg, but also wanted to be as self-reliant as possible,” Mrs. Egg said.
Their farm on National Trails Highway, 13 miles west of Barstow, contains two houses, storage buildings and three wells amid the cottonwoods and fruitless mulberry trees.
The garden is west of the house, and the orchard and still lies at the edge of desert hills beyond the backyard.
With the help of sons Jay, 16; Brian, 14; David, 13, and Steven, 11, Theron Egg partitioned the old square dance hall into separate bedrooms and a library.
Jay and David share one bedroom, and Brian and Steven have their own.
Darlene, 10; Carolyn, 8 and Heidi, 7, share a large bedroom, and Aaron, 6, and Benjamin, 4, share another.
When the family garden is green during the summer, the Eggs save from $50 to $100 monthly. “Carol canned tons of tomatoes last summer, made pickles from cucumbers and froze green peas that Grandma (Stella) shelled,” Egg recalled.
“We also had honeydew melon and watermelon, cantaloupes and pumpkins.”
Mrs. Egg estimated she canned 200 quarts of fruits and garden vegetables last year, and 100 this year. Meanwhile, the family harvested “loads of apples and lots of plums and pears,” she recalled. They made applesauce, and fruit leather (dried sheets of fruit) from apricots, plums and peaches.
“We don’t buy prepared foods, and seldom buy canned goods,” Mrs. Egg said.
“We spend about $175 to $200 a month for groceries, and $50 for toiletries, soap and medications,” Egg estimated.
“That’s about $250 for everything, except mortgage (an additional $250) and taxes and insurance (about $1,000 a year).”
His wife quickly added: “The $250 each month also includes the $10 to $20 spent for material for clothes.”
She said her and free trof pants for the boys this school year, and five corduroy Material and thread makes the cost about $3 per pair compared to an average $15 for store-bought trousers. She estimates the family saves about $25 a month by sewing its own clothes.
Darlene helps with some sewing.
“I’ve sewed a blouse and skirt, but the material was old and fell apart,” she admitted.
Jay, who earns $3.75 an hour as a cook at the Harvey House Restaurant near Lenwood, buys his own clothes.
Brian and David earned $25 each by helping a neighbor change the transmission on his car, and spent the money on clothing.
The average $142 cost of raising a pig was offset by the sales. Darlene sold hers for $304 – a gain of $162. Steven earned $100 with his.
A major family saving comes from careful shopping, Theron Egg said.
“We eat three to four loaves of bread a day,” he estimated. “Carol bakes some of it, but we buy a lot at the discount store in Barstow.
“We buy five loaves, sometimes even 10, for $1. At 60 cents for an average loaf, we save $300 a year buying it this way or baking it.”
The family drinks about 1½ gallons of milk daily, and by buying powdered milk they save about 18 cents per quart, Egg estimated. That means a saving of about $350 a year.
“We buy peanut butter, honey, eggs and fresh vegetables in the winter. Once a week we’ll buy boxed cereal – the rest I make by grinding oats and wheat.”
“We also buy 25 pound bags of flour and beans, and get oranges in 40-pound bags from our Latter-day Saints (Mormon) farm near Riverside.” During summer months here, members of the local church exchange vegetables at church bazaars.
Electricity is a major expense. Egg estimated it costs about $130 a month to operate lights, pumps, refrigerator, stove, and heater. Brian and Steven cut firewood from the nearby Mojave River bottoms to feed a fire in the Franklin stove that warms the living room and kitchen.
Egg said the family saves $60 to $75 a month on butane by using firewood. Gas is used only for heating hot water and a clothes dryer, which Egg estimated at $50 a month.
“Up until last year, we put rocks (and sometimes newspapers) on top of the stove, wrapped them in towels and took them to bed to help warm us,” Brian and Steven recalled.
Since then, the family bought electric blankets for all the children at a total cost of $200.
Gasoline is expensive for the Eggs. It costs $4 for the 26-mile roundtrip to Barstow.
But Egg hopes the alcohol still, using corn raised on the farm, will cut their fuel costs by half. Meanwhile, Jay saves gasoline by riding a motorcycle to work.
“And everybody turns off the lights,” Egg added. “Everything we save will go into a family fund for a trip together next summer.”
Reprinted from the Sun Telegram (circa Friday, January 23, 1981):
