I am one who believes that where we grew up
and when we grew up influences who we are today
in ways that go way beyond
in many instances, our knowledge of that factor.
How we see the world
how we see our relationship with other people
how we see the land and its importance
how we view nature.
All of those, for those of us who grew up on farms
at a time when I did
are a part of who we are today.
For a long time, I was not too pleased to share it
because I was enamored
by the "more cosmopolitan" people
that I knew who had grown up in the city
and knew the ways of the city.
Today, I'm as proud as proud can be
of having experienced what I experienced.
I wouldn't change it for anything.
Not that it was all wonderful, because it wasn't.
We never made a whole lot of money.
And all during the later years of the Depression
when I was a wee little one
things were tough, but we had work.
Too much work, in my estimation as kid.
But we had something to eat
and I always had a roof over my head
and a pair of bib overalls.
New ones, once a year or so.
What more would you want?
And friends.
And a chance to have some fun
and to go fishing, and to go for a walk.
What more is there that's important?
[various bird species chirping]
[wind blowing]
*
If you go back to the middle of the Great Depression
that's when I was born, in 1934
out here in Waushara County
which is in the central part of the state.
We had one of those terminal moraine farms
where the glacier stopped.
Oh, my gosh, it was stony.
It was sandy, and it was hilly.
As my dad said, in the spring
when we, every April, picked stones day after day
"If nothing else grows on this place
if nothing else ever comes up
we can depend on our crop of stones."
Our farm was 160 acres, quarter section
which was common in those days.
There were 80 acres
on each side of a country road.
A gravel, mostly dirt, country road.
Our farmhouse was a big house.
Many of the old farmhouses looked quite spacious
and they were.
We had no indoor plumbing.
We had no electricity.
That old house was the coldest place you could imagine
because it was not insulated.
People didn't know about insulation.
But I have fond memories of the place.
There were two doors into the house.
Everyone came in through the kitchen door.
There was a little porch around in the back.
There was also a front door, which led into the parlor.
We knew immediately, when someone came to the house
if they knew or did not know about country people.
If they were a sales person out of the city
they would stumble up toward the front door.
The front door wouldn't even open.
You could not get the front door open.
It was nailed shut.
Anybody who knew farmers
knew that you came around to the kitchen door on the porch
and you rapped on the kitchen door.
You were greeted by Fanny, our old farm dog
who would bark two or three times.
It'd scare the bajeebers out of these city salespeople
who didn't understand farm dogs either.
Because the farm dog
I suspected was a guard dog of some fashion
but this big collie dog was as friendly as could be.
She was mostly announcing someone's coming.
I actually remember my mother being so put out
with a salesperson who wouldn't get out of the car
because the dog was standing there barking.
She just let him sit there.
Kitchens on these old farmhouses were enormous.
They were huge, bigger than the dining room
larger than the parlor.
We never used the parlor.
The parlor was for the city relatives.
It's the kitchen where everything happened.
The big kitchen table
a wooden table with an oilcloth on it
and a kerosene lamp in the middle
that was the center of all activity on our farm.
My dad had his place at the head of the table
my mother on the opposite end of the table.
I have twin brothers.
They sat on one side, and I sat on the other.
We never varied.
We sat in those same places all the time.
It's like the cows in the barn
always stood in the same stall.
We had our stalls for breakfast, dinner and supper
all gathered around the kitchen table.
The kitchen table is where
all of the decisions about the farm were made, as well.
What sorts of seed should we buy for the garden this year?
How are the cows doing?
My mother kept all the records.
In the wintertime, that was a nice warm place.
There's the kitchen stove, the oven door was open.
My mother was always baking bread
and the smell of fresh bread
is something that I've never forgotten.
Now in the dining room, was our telephone.
We didn't have electricity, but we had a telephone.
It was a party line telephone.
It had a ringer-dinger on this side
and it had a listener on that side you held up
and a mouthpiece in the front.
When you spoke into it, you knew very well
that beyond the person that you were talking to
there were probably ten or 15 other people also listening in.
In addition to it being our connection to the outside world
it was our safety net.
In those days, there were no EMTs.
The fire truck would not leave the Village of Wild Rose
which was our nearest town, four and a half miles away.
So farmers were on their own.
If there was a fire, the wind blew over your barn
somebody was gored by a bull
or whatever action that might have happened
you got on the phone
and you rang what was called a general ring.
A general ring was ding, ding, ding, ding, ding
ding, ding, ding, like that.
When you heard that, you rushed to the phone
because you knew
one of your neighbors was in dire straits.
No matter what you were doing
and no matter how little you may have cared about that person
because farm people like are everybody else
they don't all get along
you rushed to that person's place.
You knew that person was in trouble
and needed your help.
[old-time phone ringing]
Our ring was a long and three shorts.
That's what differentiated people.
They knew when it was their ring that the phone was for them.
But everybody else went to the phone, as well.
One ring, in particular, three shorts, ding, ding, ding
whenever that came in, we knew
we knew, there was something important for us to hear.
If not important, at least juicy.
Because this family had a wonderful reputation.
When they first moved in
the farm had been vacant for a while.
Then we heard it had been purchased.
We all gathered at this house
and we all brought something to eat.
We all sat around the table.
We discovered that they had five boys
but we also discovered that these kids could cuss.
I mean, these kids were the best cussers.
They knew cuss words we'd never heard before.
I mean, they could string together cuss words
in such an eloquent fashion
that we couldn't help but just marvel.
My mother was sitting off to the side
being the good Christian woman that she was.
I could see she was not taking all this in too well.
In fact, she whispered to my dad, "We've got to go home.
This is not a good place to be."
By the way, when we were traveling home
my mother said, "I don't want you boys"
meaning my brothers and me
"I don't want you associating with those boys again."
My dad said, "Listen, Eleanor
they are going to associate with those boys.
We're going to associate with them
because they are our neighbors."
That's very important to remember.
As different as they were, as unusual as they were
and maybe as sort of raw and rough as they were
they were still our neighbors.
I had such a wonderful experience in sociology
as a kid, without ever realizing it.
Because in our community, we had Welsh families.
We had German families.
We had Bohemian families from Czechoslovakia.
Polish families.
And we had English people.
All of us assembled together.
We seldom talked about religion
because we had Methodists, we had Lutherans
we had Presbyterians, we had Catholics.
And we had a bunch of them
not belonging to anything, all working together
living together, farming together.
And to tell you the truth
having a wonderful time together, as you think about it.
It was just a fascinating time on the farm in those days.
I'm the oldest
so I'm expected to be out in the barn
at 5:30 in the morning helping with the milking.
We had two barn lanterns.
My dad had one and I had one.
I'd hang my barn lantern
on a nail in back of the cows on the north end of the barn.
In the south end of the barn
my dad hangs his lantern on a nail.
The cows are all lined up.
There's about 14 or 16 of them, all standing in stanchions.
I have my cows to milk and he has his cows to milk.
The barn on a winter day
is the warmest place on the farm.
Underneath a big, old Holstein cow
is by far the most comfortable place you could find
as strange as that sounds.
So I would crawl under this cow
put the milk pail between my knees
sit on a three-legged stool
and grab the spigots and start milking.
The cat comes by
and you squirt a little milk in the direction of the cat.
[laughs]
I'm tucked under this big, old Holstein
and she's looking around at me
and she's saying, "Good morning, Jerry."
I'm kind of half asleep, and I'm just getting warm.
I have the easy milking cows.
My dad has the tougher ones to do.
When they come into the barn they each knew
to come into their own stall.
There was Violet, Maisy, Dolores and Florence.
Every one had it's own name.
We got to know every one of them.
Our farm dog knew their personalities better than I did.
She dealt with each cow in a very particular way
and in a mysterious kind of way.
There was a communication between animal species
that we don't understand.
That was going on with Fanny talking to these cattle.
They had great respect for her.
[dog barking]
Farm life was a quiet time during those years
before electricity, and tractors
and all the rest of the noisy stuff that came along.
That's when I got to know my dad.
He might be on a cow right next to me.
He would sometimes ask how things were going
but not usually.
I would usually have to ask some question for him to answer.
Now my dad was a wonderful story teller.
Oh, my gosh.
He got as far as fifth grade in school.
In his generation, by the time you got big enough to work
it didn't matter how old you were
big enough to work, you worked.
But I learned something very important
from the fact that he had only a fifth-grade education.
Formal education
does not necessarily equate with being smart.
He knew how to fix most everything.
He knew how to take care of animals.
He had a wonderful way of figuring.
He could figure in his head faster than most people
could figure it with a calculator today.
He was very well liked by the neighbors.
He would help anybody with anything.
You look at his face
and you could tell by the satisfaction in his face
if you did something well.
But there was none of this "good job" stuff, and all that.
That was not-- we didn't do that.
In early March, when I would get up in the mornings
and go out the barn
now the days were somewhat longer already
I would look for the dripping of eaves
the first melt.
You get out to the barn and Pa might say something
like, "I can smell spring today."
And he was right, I could too.
He's getting anxious, because by the middle of March
he wants to get out in the fields.
There's work to be done.
There's plowing to do, with a team of horses
and a one-bottom, 16" walking plow.
How do you remember all that? Because I did it.
I talk to kids sometimes.
I talk about walking plows, they think the plow was walking.
The plow was not walking.
I was the one who was doing the walking
and the team was walking, Frank and Charlie were their names.
Plowing with a team of horses
requires about four or five eyes.
You've got to keep your eye on the team and the plow.
You've got to keep your eye on where you're headed
because you want to go in a straight line.
One of the things that you were prized for
was whether you could plow in a straight line.
You had a marker, maybe your handkerchief
was hanging on a tree a quarter mile away
and you see that and you're plowing towards that.
You got another eye looking for stones.
You'd hold on to the plow handles.
Whenever the plow would hit a stone
it would leap out of the ground.
You'd put it back in and go.
I mean, you're just beside yourself.
[sounds of farmer plowing with horse team]
I'll talk about my mother for a little bit.
She got as far as seventh grade in school
because, again, her folks said
"Well, it's time for you to find a job."
So she became a maid
when she was, I don't know, 13-years old.
My mother had two major projects
the garden and the chickens.
She ruled both with a heavy hand.
We were under her employ when those two things were involved.
We had probably 100-150 laying hens
white leghorns they were.
Every year we'd replace some.
The old chickens became stew in the fall.
We canned the chicken meat and all that kind of stuff.
But the new chicks we would order from a hatchery
some place in southern Wisconsin.
They would arrive at the train depot.
George was the depot agent.
He would call on the party line telephone.
"Herman, your chicks are here."
I remember going down with my dad to the depot
and here are stacks of chicks.
The boxes were about like that
and they were divided into little squares.
I suppose there were 6-8 little chicks in each corner.
They were peeping their hearts out.
I mean, it's just a wonderful sound
all these little chicks just a-peeping away.
We'd stack these little chicks in the back of the car
bring them home, take them in the house
and put them in back of the wood stove to warm them up.
Because this was usually in April and it was kind of chilly.
It was kind of fun.
The little chicks were just grand to watch them grow up.
When the chicks had grown up
then they found their way into the hen house
and the ones that my mother
had declared, obsolete is the wrong word
but they're not producing well anymore.
We'd pull them off the shelf
and we would have a chicken butchering day.
I tell you, one time the city cousins were out
when we were butchering chickens.
They could not handle
the fact that there would be as many as two or three chickens
running around without their heads on.
We, of course, took all this for granted.
We never bought a chicken in a grocery store that I remember.
Never did that.
It sounds terrible, gruesome, and all the rest of it
but it was a very natural progression
from the chick to the hen house
to the cellar shelf, and to our table.