For Joseph Smith the days passed quickly. He tried to absorb as much information as he could about new technology and bother his older sister, Anna, as much as possible at the same time. He loved the morning and when his Mother came to wake him up he had already washed his face, combed his hair and was dressed.

He ran into the kitchen and began his chores. He had to haul three buckets of water into the house from the water pump in the yard. Mother would use the water during the day for things around the house. Then he had to feed the horse, June, and make sure that the six chickens inside the chicken fence had food. The chickens would be killed soon and the meat would be salted to be eaten during the winter. Since he like morning so much he told his parents that he wanted to be a newsboy and shout out the newspaper headlines on the town streets to help sell papers. His parents told him he didn’t have to work, even if he wanted to. They said that only poor people made their children work outside the house. Joseph knew he would rather be a newsboy than do chores at home. Still thinking about how he could become a "newsie" he finished up and went inside for breakfast.

While eating, Joseph looked at the newspaper his father had left on the table the day before. He saw an announcement for a Chautauqua coming to Field. Almost every year a traveling group of artists in all varieties came past Field in a show called a Chautauqua. And every four to five years the whole family would travel to the next town to see the circus that stopped there. Joseph begged his mother to take him to the Chautauqua the next weekend and see the writers, the trapeze artists, the strong men and the exotic animals. Her response was, "You’ll have to talk to your father." That meant no.

After breakfast he gathered up is grammar books and lunch pail and headed out to school. Each week father gave each Anna and Joseph a few pennies. On the walk into town Joseph told Anna that he wasn’t going to spend any of his pennies that week. He wasn’t going to buy any candy or soda pop because he wanted to go and see the motion picture show that was coming to town at Thanksgiving time. It cost a whole nickel to go, but it was by far the best movie ever made. It was called "The Great Train Robbery". It had no sound but it was a whole 12 minutes long! Anna told him she didn’t think he could resist candy, but he said, "Yes I can, you’ll see".

After morning classes and during lunch Joseph and his friends had a good time chasing the younger girls. When their teacher, Ms. Brown scolded them they went and sat on the steps and talked about the first coast-to-coast automobile trip earlier that year. Joseph was considered the expert on automobiles in his group because he had actually seen one when his father had taken him to Chicago for a baseball game. He described it as a jerking, bouncy way to travel, but said that it looked like a lot more fun than driving a horse and cart. If all the boys had their wish they would own an Oldsmobile and go the full ten miles per hour speed limit allowed in most cities. And some of Joseph’s friends said that if they owned an automobile they would race in the streets like the very rich boys did and go eighteen miles an hour! They laughed as they joked about how the policemen would have to chase them on bicycles.

After school got out Anna dragged him to the general store so that she could look at the magazines for girls. He stood impatiently by the door watching people walk in and out and he spied the candy counter. He quickly looked away and listened to people talk. One woman was talking about the price of bread and her husband complained about the cost of whiskey. Then the woman responded that if he didn’t drink so much whiskey she would have more money for bread for the children. He ignored her and said he was going to the saloon. Joseph listened to a very elegantly dressed woman tell the general store clerk that she just talked to her cousin in Denver by telephone. There was only one telephone in the entire town and it was at the post office. It was very expensive to make a phone call and you could only talk for a short time, but like all new inventions Joseph was fascinated by it. He just couldn’t stand it any more and he went and bought two pieces of candy for a penny. Anna gave him an "I told you so" look and said she was ready to go home.

On the way home Joseph pretended that he was on a train and that made Anna really mad because she was still jealous that Joseph had gotten to go with Father to Chicago and she hadn’t been able to. Just to prove that she was still older and better she said she would race him home. At the door Joseph said he had won and Anna said she had. Mother interrupted and told them both to get inside and do their chores.

Joseph found the water buckets and got more water from the pump for the evening. Then he took out the food scraps to the garbage pile in the back. Joseph was grateful that they had space to bury their garbage because the city had no organized way of picking up the garbage and the people that lived close together in town had to put it next to their outhouses. The Smiths weren’t lucky enough to have indoor toilets yet, they still used outhouses too, but Joseph had heard his father talking to some men in town about running electricity out to the Smiths’ house. He fed June again and seeing that her mane was dirty from her trip into town with mother, he combed her. As he looked up at the bright blue sky he thought about the Wright Brothers. They were two gentlemen from Dayton, OH who were creating flying machines and testing them along the ocean in North Carolina. He wondered what it felt like to look down on his house from far above in the sky.

When June was combed, he went inside and worked on his homework until dinner was served. After dinner his mother wanted him to take a bath for the church picnic tomorrow, but he said he didn’t want to. After all he had just taken a bath four days before. He sat down next to his father, who was reading a book, and began to talk about the World Series. It was going to be held for the first time ever in about a month. It wasn’t final yet, but everyone thought Philadelphia would be playing Boston and most bets were being placed on Boston. Joseph hoped he would be able to go and see a World Series game someday.