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Bob Stanley
Hatteberg's People
Reporter: Larry Hatteberg
| September 22, 2002--All around him Bob Stanley sees 'moments' in history. That's why this Augusta man is saving what he sees in the form of 'hard time' homes. They are replicas of homes, businesses and other buildings. They look real and they are not easy to do. |  | | As he shows me the display of early day homes and buildings in his small living room, Bob Stanley finds himself in love with the past. With an eye for detail and the artistic ability honed painstakingly over time, Stanley finds these small buildings bring back memories in all of us. | 
| "They are pieces of history you can take to a school and show the kids how the horses ran around the barn and what the men did. You look at these old outfits here and you can see the man coming in at the end of the day and setting down and enjoying himself." | | Out on some Butler County Prairie he owns, Stanley hunches over a dry stream bed looking for just the right kind of shale rock. It might be a fence or a wall for a house....but it has to be just right. "Ah yeah, here's a good one. It helps if you get them kinda square to have the grain running right because then you can cut them and do something with them." | | No one loves his retirement more than Bob. "This is fun because it's not a job. It's not something I have to punch in of a morning and I don't have to have it done by noon. This is what you do when you have time to enjoy your time." |  | | So when he's not outside finding parts for his 'hard time' homes, he's inside--enjoying his little city---on display in his living room. "Older people who grew up on the farms and lived in the country communities, they remember stuff like this." There is the old Leon depot, another little building we've all see with some boards missing. It looks like so many of the buildings we see in our own home town. There too is a little building that looks like someone's retirement haven. Next to it, a little country church. Hard time buildings that come to life on Bob Stanley's back porch. |  | "My longest project took seven months, but that depot in there that took most of the summer. It's enjoyable and that's the main thing to me. I'm 70 years old, so there is a lot to enjoy. If there is work to this, I guess I haven't realized it as work yet." |
Bob Stanley's 'Hard Time' homes are on display at the Augusta Historical Museum and the El Dorado Historical Museum.
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