This day in history: Woman writes letters to zoos to find pygmy goat for pet. Mom, three kids found in train car traveling cross-country

From 1976: Carolleone Eres, of Greenacres, “finally got her goat,” the Spokane Chronicle wrote.

Eres had seen West African pygmy goats at Knott’s Berry Farm in California, and she “decided a pygmy goat would make a good pet.”

So she wrote over 25 letters to zoos and other organizations, trying to find a goat. She finally got a response from a woman in Oregon who had nine pygmy goats and was willing to part with two.

Now, Eres was the proud owner of Keno and Kim. They were nearly full grown, but “smaller than a cocker spaniel.”

“They’re cute little devils,” she said.

They were getting along fine with the couple’s dogs, cats and rabbits.

The neighbors called the Eres yard “the Eres Walk in the Wild.”

From 1926: Clara G. Berry and her three small children told a tale of woe after they were discovered huddled in a freight car by the railroad master at Parkwater.

She was “wearing a knife at her waist” and said she had gone for “26 hours one time without a bite of food for herself or her kiddies because they did not dare go far from the train.”

She said she and her kids, 13, 11 and 8, left a small town in Ohio in an old car, heading for Seattle where her brother had a ranch.

“We struggled along until we were 15 miles the other side of Custer, Mont., where the old car nearly fell to pieces,” she said. “We sold it to a farmer for $10 and walked to Custer, where we climbed into a freight car to continue our trip. It was terrible and at times I feared the children would starve.”

The family was in “deplorable condition from the dirt of the freight trains and from being underfed.” The Social Service Bureau took the family under its care, put them up in a hotel and planned to send them along to Seattle.