Didit.Live

I’m writing this Down on the Farm series to paint a backdrop for this blog.  These posts will cover the final years of the transition from the late Iron Age to mechanized farming. By 1950 farming had changed from labor to capital intensive. My dad lived through a longer part of that transition than I did, of course. I learned about blacksmithing, horses, engine repair, tractors, grain augers, self- propelled combines, and other practical things by watching and working with him. Some of it was hard work, but it was interesting, and I was proud to be doing it. It played a big part in my becoming who I am. I hope a few stories about those times will give you some sense what I experienced down on the farm.

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Nancy, Cathy and Barb will recall the big red barn on the “home place”. There were 6 horse stalls in that barn, and two horses to a stall made 12. By the time my dad was 14 he was doing much of the plowing and planting with those horses.

I often heard dad say, “We kept 12 horses in that barn. In the morning I hitched six of them up [to some farm implement] and went out in the field to work. At noon I brought them back in and had dinner (lunch is still called dinner in Kansas). After dinner, I hitched up six more and went back out in the field to work until supper.” Somehow he didn’t think it was fair that the horses worked half a day and he had to work all day.

Most Midwestern farms had a big red barn in 1900. They were for horses and milk cows. There was hay in the loft and oats in a bin to feed them. There was a “stock tank” outside for them to drink from (and for boys to swim in). Building a barn was a big undertaking. The community held a barn raising when it was time to build one of those barns.

By 1920, tractors had replaced horses on over half of those farms. Barns fell into disuse. Their color changed from barn red to weathered gray over the years. Lack of maintenance doomed the roofs. The wood inside warped and rotted when rain began to penetrate the barn. By 2000, all but a few barns were torn down or had collapsed in on themselves. Sad.

My Grandpa Spohn followed German tradition. When Uncle Ralph, the eldest son, got married he helped finance a farm for him. That was the German way. Uncle Charlie, the middle son, got no help with a farm, but he was free to leave home when he got married. As the youngest son, my dad was expected to stay home and help on the farm. No getting married, no high school, no leaving. That was the German way. He did buy my dad a nice 12-gage, double-barreled shotgun though.

My grandpa’s family made drain tile in Kokomo County, Indiana.  Farmers used it to drain their fields. Grandpa left Indiana for Kansas City, Missouri late in the 19th Century. He worked in a roundhouse there repairing locomotives. After three years, they sent him down the track as a railroad engineer (train driver would make better sense). He had to leave that job for health reasons (malaria) after a few years though, but that’s where he got the know how to run a steam tractor. Then he ran a country store for a while and ended up buying the farm I grew up on.

Grandpa bought a steam tractor and a threshing machine when my dad was about 17 years old.  He didn’t buy the steam tractor for himself. Grandpa saw himself more as the “farm manager.” It was my dad’s job to make a profit with the tractor and threshing machine. Their business was threshing wheat and oats in return for a “custom threshing” fee.

The tractor pulled the threshing machine from farm to farm, and it powered the threshing machine. A great long belt ran between a big pulley on the tractor and a smaller one on the threshing machine. The cylinder (the part that knocks the kernels out of the head) needed to run twice as fast as the steam engine. The belt was mounted with a half twist. That trick kept the belt centered on the pulleys. Otherwise, it was sure to “walk” to the side of the pulleys and fall off.

It took a crew of a dozen or more men and boys to thresh wheat or oats. Most of them were usually the farmer’s neighbors. They all came to your place to help thrash your crop, and you went to each of theirs in return. The wheat had already been cut and bound into sheaves. The crew brought the sheaves in on wagons, pitched them in the thresher’s maw, hauled the grain away, kept coal and water in the steam tractor, etc. My dad was the (young) man in charge. He used to say, “I’ve done every job on a threshing crew except cook and wash dishes.” (Women and girls were working in the farmhouse to keep the men fed and watered.)

I don’t know how long my dad ran that thrashing rig. Grandpa Spohn died when my dad was about 20 years old. My dad and Uncle Charlie continued to run the farm for his mother Frankie. It’s likely they were still using that thrashing machine at the home place. I know they stopped using it when they each got combines. 😉

After his father died, his mother let him attend McPherson Academy (high school). He lived in the dorm there. He went on to McPherson College as well. You could harvest wheat, plow the ground, and replant the wheat in the summer months in those days. He was free during the rest of the year to go to school. All that’s another story.

That’s the background for my dad’s practical education. Dad was a natural born engineer. He knew how things worked, and understood the principles behind the skills he developed. Dad could handle anything from blacksmithing to fine woodworking, and from horses to internal combustion engines. He did most of it with hand tools.

His skills were apparent when a piece of equipment broke down. Dad would analyze what went wrong and say, “Some dumb engineer thought….” Then he’d improvise a way to make it work again. One year his friend and neighbor came over with a new hay baler to bale our alfalfa hay. It worked great all morning, but in the afternoon it began to stop at random with a loud bang. Dad looked the baler over and saw that a pawl was dragging against the cover of the timing mechanism. That caused it to trip, which put the timing out of step. We stuck a stick of wood under the edge of the cover so the pawl wouldn’t drag, and got back to bailing.

The equipment dealer got a factory representative to come see the problem. After looking at dad’s solution, he said they would redesign the cover. Meanwhile, the stick of wood remained in place. A couple of years later our neighbor had worn that baler out and replaced it with a new one. He came over to our place to try out the new one. We saw they made more room the pawl. It looked good to go.

So we started baling hay. Bang! The timing mechanism went out of whack right away. The factory built in more clearance for the pawl, but they hadn’t gone far enough. Like the carpenter who said, “I’ve sawed it off three times already, and it’s still too short.”

My dad predictably remarked, “Some dumb engineer didn’t plan on any variation in manufacturing.” In went a stick of wood to prop up the cover, and we got back to baling hay.

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In the previous post, I mentioned that we lived in Two Buttes during the school year and migrated to Kansas in the summer to farm. There were several towns around us, but they were ten or more miles away. Another place in the middle of a smaller nowhere. Not nearly as bleak though.

My dad farmed from when he was 14 years old until the year he died — 70 years. I’ll relate more of that history in the next posts. [Down on the Farm — Part One | Down on the Farm — Part Two]

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I’ve deduced that I don’t have any memories of migrating between Two Buttes and the farm until I was five years old. Like my memories of Two Buttes, they are just snippets. Some of them follow below, not necessarily in order:

Once, on the way back to the farm, we ran into a swarm of brown grasshoppers. So many smashed on the windshield that my dad could barely see to drive. Brown grasshoppers are locusts, and they sometimes form a plague. They eat everything green in sight. That’s what happened to the Egyptians in the time of Moses. In this case, it was just another aspect of the Dust Bowl.

I only remember our arrival in back in Kansas from one other year. I have no idea what happened during the journey itself. Perhaps I took a nap. My memory kicked in as we turned off the road to a path through a field of tall prairie grass. We were headed toward a house. I just now deduced how the path was formed. The traffic involved in putting the house there wore the grass down.

That place was a farm that my folks “rented” from Grandpa Miller. (One-third of the crops go to the landlord.) The house had one room. It was about 16 by 16 feet in size. The walls were not finished inside. Just studs like the inside of an unfinished garage. By this time there were five of us. We had no running water or electricity, but I think we had a well. There must have been an outhouse. But we were only there for the summer.

There was an old farmhouse there originally, and we had planned to live in it. The owners sold it to my grandfather as part of the farm. Grandpa Miller allowed them to stay there until we arrived. But they had other ideas. They insured the house and later burned it down. They did not understand that they no longer had an insurable interest in the house. Living there didn’t count. Those previous owners couldn’t collect any insurance; we didn’t have a real house to live in, and they narrowly avoided going to jail.

On one trip out to Two Buttes, I was riding with my dad and a friend of his. I can’t imagine why anyone would need a ride to Two Buttes, and I don’t know why my mom and siblings weren’t with us. They must have come later. We were towing a 4-wheel trailer that dad converted from a Model T Ford chassis. We had loaded it with all our household goods. I was in the back seat.

As we drove along I saw a tire rolling past the car. It rolled on past us and ended up in the ditch. It was from our trailer. But no problem. Model T tires were mounted on a rim that was a separate part of the wheel. It wasn’t unusual for them to come off. We jacked up the wheel, put the rim and tire back on and continued on our way.

The last thing I remember about migrating was loading that old trailer with all our possessions. We were moving back to Kansas for good. One detail sticks in my mind. We had a wooden stave barrel that we put clothes and bedding in. We probably had a Maytag Washer, wash tubs, and other household things. There was probably an astronomical telescope in there too. I don’t think we had much in the way of furniture.

Our destination this time was the farm that Dad grew up on. Frankie, his mother, wanted to move to town. Due to the Depression, Dad was the only one that had the money to buy it. I remember his mother, Aunt Lula, and a couple others coming out of the house to greet us when we arrived. I guess they went off somewhere, and we moved in.

That was the last time we traveled from Two Buttes to Kansas. The Depression was coming to an end. We now had enough farmland to make a good living. We had 160 acres at the “home place,” and 200 acres more at the farm that Grandpa Miller owned. A total of 360 acres. That’s about as much land as one family needed to live comfortably in those days.

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I found some nice videos about old-time farming —  combines in particular —  on YouTube. [Palouse, Washington in the mid-1940s – YouTube | To Till a Field: Man and Machine in the Palouse – YouTube]

This is a blog, not a book so I’ll make no attempt to keep it chronological. It’s not a diary either. I guess it’s a retrospective — mostly from memory. I do want to start with some of the earliest things I remember, and this is one of them. Many of them are from living in Colorado. We’ll get to Kansas eventually. Maybe California, Washington and Arizona too.

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I once had a nice chat with Michael Bloomfield at a big outdoor blues workshop in San Francisco. I had no idea who he was in the blues scene at the time. He was setting up for his presentation. East Colorado Blues [~Written by Mississippi John Hurt and played by Michael Bloomfield – YouTube]

The roots of this story are in Two Buttes, Colorado. Two Buttes is located in Southeast Colorado. It is one of those places that is in the middle of nowhere. If you spent a year in that corner of Colorado you’d know what the title of this post reflects. I was too young at the time to be bothered by such things.

How we got to Colorado is a story in itself, so I’ll give you the short version. We landed in Two Buttes because my dad, who was a school teacher at the time, couldn’t find a job anywhere else. He had been teaching in Quinter, Kansas. But depression-era politics at the local school board left him without a job in the depths of the Great Depression.

Years later my dad told me, “I drove all over half the state of Kansas looking for a job.” But he couldn’t find one. Then Aunt Lula, my dad’s sister who had a farm out by Two Buttes, heard of his plight. His sister told him that he should come out there.

She told him the WPA had built a new high school in Two Buttes, but the town could not find a teacher who would move to such a desolate place. He took the job as principal though. We were in Two Buttes from 1935-1938 or so.

Link to an Aerial View of Two Buttes

Two Buttes is a little worse for the wear now. We lived in that little house on the NE corner of 5th and F Streets. Marcia and I found it there 50 years later. It was boarded up. (It’s gone now.) The tiny church on the other corner of 5th and F is still there today. About 50 people live in Two Buttes now.

Not only were we in Colorado in the depression. We were there during the worst part of it and the worst years of the Dust Bowl to boot. Those dust storms created drifts that looked like black snowdrifts. Of course, I didn’t know much about those things then. They also uncovered many Indian arrowheads. My dad had a nice collection of them.

I only remember one of those dust storms. My dad and I stepped out of the house to check out the storm. The wind doesn’t necessarily blow hard during those storms, but the dust had blotted out the sun. You couldn’t see your hand at the end of your arm. We didn’t stay out there long. Those dust storms continued for years.

The Dust Bowl eventually blew Aunt Lula and her family out of their farm. They simply couldn’t grow crops. Even if they could, prices were so depressed that they would have been practically giving what they grew away. So they went back to Kansas to live in a second house on what was then still my grandmother’s farm. We lived in Two Buttes during the school year, toughing it out in the dust and depression. We’ll have a story or three about farming later.

I was six years old when we left Two Buttes for good. I don’t have many memories of the place. Mostly just fragments. Here’s most of them:

There was a nice little reservoir out by the two buttes that the town was named after. They are the only thing sticking up from a vast flatness in all directions. There was an irrigation reservoir out there too. The water came from the mountains over a hundred miles away. My dad loved the good fishing there.

I have vague memories of going to that reservoir a couple times, and a hazy recollection of the buttes across the road. One time the five of us and a visiting couple had a picnic in the canyon below the Two Buttes Dam. That canyon was the most beautiful place around. There was a little creek, pools of water, lots of trees, and it was nice and cool down there. I have no idea what we had to eat for the picnic.

Stylish-casual was not the fashion in those times. Suits were the proper attire for most occasions. Mom (or maybe Grandma Miller) decided that Paul and I should have nice wool suits to wear for “dress”. They were made of coarse, not “fine” wool though. Boy, did they itch. I can still feel them. You can see in the picture that my hair is parted on the wrong side. I was 50 years old before I figured that out and switched.

We wore those suits for a trial visit to the little church across the street. I guess the suits were a bit slick. Paul persisted in sliding off our pew and under the one ahead of us. I think mom was as glad as we were to get out of there. I don’t think she took us back.

Many states, Kansas and Colorado included, had their own sales-tax tokens (aluminum coins) then. Many items cost a dime or less in those days, and people resented paying a whole penny for sales tax on them. The solution was tokens, which were worth 1/10 of a cent. For example, a Pepsi cost 5 cents plus a token or two.

We probably had been hounding our mother to let us go to the store. You could get a nice piece of candy there for a penny. One day she agreed we could go to the store and gave us each 10 tokens. She deputized me to lead the way. It was only two blocks away, but we had to pass by an open basement where a hotel had burned down. I guess she was afraid we’d try to explore it, so I was ordered not to go on that side of the street under any circumstances. Obviously, we all survived the excursion. I don’t know what kind of candy we picked out.

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We farmed in Kansas during the summer. That meant we migrated back and forth from Colorado to Kansas each year… Coming up in the next post.