By Dr. Robert E. Plucker
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| The farm, circa 1950 |
Dim
recollections of earlier houses exist in my mind, but the first clear memories
I have are of the old farm-house in South Dakota, in Turner County. It was
located a quarter of a mile east of Germantown Church. My dad usually said that
it was ten miles west and ten miles south of Sioux Falls. The house itself was
of various ages, a series of additions built onto additions that added up to a
seven room house with lots of connecting entryways. The oldest part of the
house, a downstairs bedroom, was more than fifty years old when we moved into
it in 1933, just in time for the driest years and the worst dust storms.
At
that time the main room served as the kitchen, dining room, and living room.
There was a "parlor", but it was not heated and so got zero use in
winter, and rarely in summer, for company only. The main room had seven doors
to all the connecting entryways and four windows. These four, even with storm
windows, were not capable of keeping out the dust or the snow during dust
storms or winter blizzards. The upstairs bedrooms were not heated, and unless
there was a hot stove-pipe from downstairs going through the floor, many times
it would be cold enough to form frost from a sleeper's breath on the
bed-covers. Mom would sometimes heat one of the old flat irons on the stove,
wrap it in paper, and let us kids have warm feet, at least.
There
was no phone and no electricity, but there was water from a pump connected to a
cistern just outside. The cistern was filled with water collected from the
roof. The water from the pump went into a kitchen sink below the spout, but the
elaborate drain system for the sink had been plugged up for many years. We had
a five-gallon bucket underneath the sink which had to be emptied regularly, or
there'd be a mess.
My
dad, a devoted Republican, was hoping that Alfred M. Landon of Kansas would be
able to defeat Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 election. He went to the
trouble of hunting up a battery operated table radio to listen to the
late-night election results. He was disappointed in the election, but
completely sold on the notion of having a radio in the house. Back in 1937/38,
radios were big clunky affairs that had tubes. Transistors came much later. In
1937 you might have a small radio that would weigh up to ten pounds, would have
five to ten tubes, and might require another twenty pounds of batteries of
various sizes. "Electric" radios existed which you could plug into
your wall socket if your house had electricity. Dad scraped together enough
money to buy this same rental set, a Coronado battery radio that was our
family's first move from no-tech to very low-tech.
AM
radio was the only choice; FM was several years in the future. In the flat
country of the Midwest, with a high radio antenna of 20 feet or so, many radio
stations could be received at great distances at night. WLW Cincinnati, KOA
Denver, WWL New Orleans, XERA Juarez Mexico, WGN Chicago are all examples.
Drawbacks? Lots of them. With so many competing stations, interference was a
big problem. There might be big explosions of static because of the lightning
and thunder storms that are common in the Midwest. Many of these stations were
affiliated with the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and with the National
Broadcasting Company's "red" and "blue" networks. The red
network had all the good programs and eventually became NBC, but the blue
network became the Mutual Broadcasting System which has since been acquired by
other large companies.
Since
so many stations were available, it was common to be able to switch from WOW
Omaha, say, to any of the other stations carrying the red network programs and
continue to listen until the next station faded out, or interference got too
annoying. Daytime was a different story because these high-powered stations
were required to cut power in daylight. The closest radio station to us was
KSOO Sioux Falls. This, plus WNAX Yankton and WHO Des Moines, was used in
daytime. WNAX was the best. Their newscaster and weather-man was Whitey Larson.
If he was predicting very cold weather he might say things like "You
better bring in an extra basket of cobs", or "If you have any brass
monkeys, you better bring them inside."
My
dad, who was a kind of a night owl, would now and then search for a far western
station to hear the repeat broadcasts of the network shows like Jack Benny,
Fred Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly. These repeats were done live for the
western time zones, and of course the timing and delivery had to be done with
care. Any ad libbing would throw off the timing, and so there were minor but
noticeable differences.
My
grandparents, John and Christina Plucker, had one of the "electric"
radios, because they lived in town and had the required 110 volt house current.
Now and then our family would be there on a Sunday evening late enough so that
the Ford Sunday Evening Hour was just coming on the air. Its theme music was
the "Children's Prayer" from Humperdinck's opera "Hansel and
Gretel." The grandparents always turned it off before their ears were
contaminated with it. This kind of music had no bearing on their lives. Grandpa
would say, in Low German of course, "That stuff doesn't pay." They
listened only to the news and the livestock market reports. I was just a little
kid and could not protest that I wanted badly to hear the rest of it. I'm not
sure exactly what Dad and Mom thought about it.
However
when we got our own battery radio, the Firestone Hour and the Coca Cola Hour
received plenty of attention, as did the broadcasts of the Longines
Symphonette. These programs were centered on light classical music. We became
acquainted with the voice of Igor Gorin (Figaro's great patter song from
"Barber of Seville") John Charles Thomas (The Green-eyed Dragon with
the Thirteen tails), and the great violist, William Primrose. In those days there
were live performances only.
Getting
back to the house itself, it was perched on some massive rocks taken from
various places out in the fields. Grandpa maintained that it was far too
expensive to get concrete for a proper foundation. In South Dakota's fierce
winds, it sometimes moved a bit, but was never completely blown off the rocks
the way I would have expected. With jacks
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| 1955 Farm house. By this time, a cement foundation had been added. |
and crowbars, Dad and Grandpa were
always able to get it back in place squarely on the rocks. We did use the small
dug-out cellar on one occasion that I remember, as a shelter from a very strong
wind, but if a true tornado-twister had ever hit it, the house would have been
completely destroyed. The house caused some worries to my sister and me,
sleeping upstairs, when it swayed a bit in a strong wind. I always wondered if
this particular sway would be the one that would end in general collapse.
The
cellar was actually a kind of root cellar, as only two of the walls were shored
up with smaller rocks. The remainder was simply dirt, unsupported. A true
basement became possible years later when the house was jacked up, and then
placed on a good solid concrete foundation. It was always comparatively cool
down there, and if it were 100 or more degrees F. outside, the cellar would
still keep the butter in one chunk. Since we had no ice-box (with real ice) and
of course no refrigerator, the butter had to be fetched upstairs each time
before using it, and then to be returned. Good job for little kids. In addition
to the butter, milk and cream, from our own cows of course, there were heaps of
potatoes in a dark corner, and - preserved in canning jars - green beans which
I loved, lots of peaches, and apple sauce, and a few jars of pears. Pint jars
of things including jellies and jams were kept in the pantry upstairs.
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| Barn, cows and dog. |
There
were 240 acres of land. 160 acres and the farm buildings were on the north side
of the road, and the remaining 80 acres were directly across the road to the
south. About 37 acres of this 80 were planted to various crops, and the remainder
was pasture, too hilly and rocky to try to plant. There were always cows to
crop the short prairie grass on the hills, and of course it was difficult to
keep them from breaking down the fence and getting into the green corn-field.
There were a few low, usually wet places on the quarter that had willow
thickets. You could tell the arrival of spring by the sound of the frogs and
toads, but the most cheerful was the wonderful song of the red-wing blackbirds.
Bird books often describe this song as a cheerful "oh-kah-leeee"
repeated many times These beautiful spring sounds almost ceased during the
worst of the dry years, but by 1938, the year my baby sister was born, they
began to come back.
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| Chicken house & dogs. |
Several
buildings made up the usual farmstead. Our farm had a house, granary, corn-
crib, chicken house, hog house, a single car garage for the car, but another
kind of shed for the Model T truck, the tractor, and whatever small farm
machinery could be crowded into it. My favorite building was the tool shed
alongside, and almost touching the machine shed. I spent many hours there
amongst the gas barrels, the oil cans, grease guns, grinders for sharpening
blades of various kinds, anvils, two vises, and a lot of Model T parts that
were scattered out behind the tool shed where a previous tenant had
disassembled a car. A favorite project of mine was to carve a speed-boat from a
short piece of 2x4, then float it in the cow-and-horse water tank.
My
dad had an old one-cylinder two-cycle engine from a Maytag clothes washer that
was not running. I had permission to play with it, and perhaps make it run, and
that meant taking it apart. So I went at it, and soon had a bunch of parts
lying on a board, but was completely baffled by the problem of putting it
together again. The magneto ignition was the most complicated. With some help
from a neighbor of ours we put it together and actually had it running about as
well as this model of Maytag could be expected to run. Since then, I suppose I
have been over-cautious about mechanical things. This combination of
fascination with a boat and fear of working on an engine may explain why today
I feel myself quite competent to sail a boat, but a klutz when the auxiliary
engine needs attention.
There
was a creek (pronounced crick) running through the big 37 acre pasture across
the road. It had created a ravine over a great many years, and in the winter
months it was fun to take a sled ride down the hill, bumping across the
cow-paths to the bottom. If the creek was dry the sled might come to a sudden
stop, perhaps with a bent runner. If we were lucky there would be ice, and
maybe the chance to steer enough to one side so as to go skimming along the ice
for a much longer distance. Of course most of the time, the downhill speed was
too great, and the sled would capsize along with its passenger on the turn.
These slopes could be ridden in certain gentle-slope places sitting up on the
sled, but the accepted method was to go on your belly, keeping the center of
gravity as low as possible.
Our
one-room country school was a bit more than a half mile further east, and the
older kids figured they could get to the pasture, slide down a few time, and
get back by the end of the noon recess. Our teacher, a Mr. Neaph Ebesen, was a
young athletic fellow, and he decided that if the older kids went sliding, all
ten or twelve of us in the school would go. He would lead the pack and we
planned it so that there were enough big sleds to let the three or four little
kids ride. The big kids pulling the little ones, we would run/walk to the
pasture on the north side of the road (actually Henry Poppinga's property) and
have a great time zooming down his even steeper slopes. All of this was when I
was in 7th, then 8th grade, the only two years that Mr. Ebesen taught at the Germantown
District 84 School.
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| Thanks to "Google" |
I
don't remember how old I was when Dad first allowed me to shoot his old
Springfield double barrel twelve-gage shot-gun. He didn't use it much as
shot-gun shells cost more than he was willing to spend, and he was not a good shot
anyway. But pheasant season in South Dakota at that time was great hunting,
because it was claimed that the pheasants out-numbered the chickens in Turner
County. One day I had just taken the gun out; another older fellow and I were
going to hunt the field just across the fence to the east of the house. We had
barely gotten over the fence when a pheasant flew up. The other fellow blasted
away with his single barrel. I waited for what should have been far too long,
apparently led the bird just right, fired, and down it came. I had mixed
feelings about it even then, although hunting was the real "guy"
thing to do.
So
here I was, several years later, I believe it was between a couple of short
hitches in the Army Reserve and Active Duty when I was away from the farm. I
went out with the trusty Springfield double-barrel, and as luck would have it,
I saw the pheasant sitting in the snow, on the ground, a pitifully easy shot.
As it happened, the bird got spooked before I pulled the trigger, but somehow I
hit it and it dropped dead not far from my feet. If you have ever seen a South
Dakota mature male pheasant in full color, you have seen beauty defined. I
looked at the poor dead bird lying there, and said to myself, "I can't do
this anymore". I never picked up the shotgun again. I did some shooting
after that, but usually with a 22 rifle and the target would be a tin can
mounted on a post.
While
I was still at home (until summer 1945) the crops did not change much. It
seemed like a simple exchange of oats in half the acreage, and corn in the
other half in alternate years. The corn was not sweet corn that you would put
on the table, but hard yellow kernels that became corn-meal after a trip
through a hammer-mill. There were a few attempts at fertilizing by planting clover
or alfalfa. The clover was better, as it has a nitrogen-fixing root, and can be
"green manure" by plowing it under. Alfalfa was too valuable to plow
under, as it was such good cattle feed.
Radio
market reports would tell us sometimes, that white-kerneled corn would be a
good crop to have, as Kellogg’s and Post would pay premium prices for this corn
used in breakfast corn-flakes. The same sort of thing happened when it was
predicted that Quaker Oats would buy a certain special kind of oats from special
seed oats.
Millet,
or cane of various sorts would be planted mainly because these grew fast and
could be used as a sort of catch-crop in case the farmer could not get into the
low places in his fields because of spring mud. Wheat, flax, barley and rye would
appear from time to time on our, and the neighbors' farms. About the time I
left for the Army Reserve, conservation practices like farming on the contour
of the land, and planting coarse grasses in the water run-off places began to
take hold. These, of course, help to prevent erosion of the soil.
The
winter of 1936/37 was very cold, subzero temperatures much of the time and snow
drifts that could stop all traffic of any kind. How the total snowfall would
compare with southeast Alaska is hard to say because of South Dakota's wind and
the flat country. The snow would collect in ditches along the roads, behind the
snow-fences and in sheltered places beside the road, making monster hard drifts
across the road. Snow at these low temperatures does not fall in large fluffy
flakes but in tiny hard chunks of ice. Snow drifts of this sort will easily
support a man without snow-shoes, and sometimes even a large-footed horse. One
hardly shovels this kind of snow; one cuts out blocks of it and lifts them out.
Sooner
or later the house-wives would run out of dry food in the house: flour, sugar,
salt, dried beans, staples of this sort. Farmers would search out a way on
horse-back to go through the relatively empty fields, across the fences,
sometimes over the road to the grocery stores in Lennox or Chancellor. They
would take back to their wives and neighbors' wives enough to get by until the
next attempt. This was the worst winter since the fabled Blizzard of 1888. There
may be some old-timers who still talk about the 1936/37 blizzard now, some 64
years later.
What
does one do when there is no outside entertainment? Of course there were always
animals to take care of, cows, sheep, horses, chickens, pigs, but that is
hardly family entertainment. There was the radio, and sometimes the board game
of "Parcheesi" but no card games. All of this had to take place in
the main big room; we would move the table closer to the stove (with open oven
door) to keep warm. In the morning when my older sister and I got up and ran
downstairs, we squabbled over which of us would get to sit on the open oven
door. One of us was OK, but both at once was too much. The old
"Quickmeal" cob/wood/coal burning kitchen range was built strongly
but not indestructibly.
On
the nights with games, or if company came, we sat around the table in the
bright white light of the Coleman gasoline pressure mantle lamp. The hissing
noise was not terribly intrusive, and the light was much better than that of
the dim, smoky kerosene lamps that made no noise. There was a silent kerosene
mantle lamp called the Aladdin lamp, but it was not much of an improvement and
it was even smokier. Ours got little use.
The
best illustrations that I can think of to show my parents' charm and
hospitality were to my friends. One high school friend was Jim Crowley. We
exchanged nights at each other's houses a couple of times. I got on well with
Jim's widowed mother and his two brothers. When Jim came to our house where
there were no brothers, I had the distinct feeling that he would rather hang
out with my dad than with me. Humph!
Once
when I was home from college, I got a late night phone call from two of my
college friends whose car had died on them a few miles from our home and they
wanted to get some help from us. I went out to their car, picked them up and
brought them home with me, not long after midnight. Both Mom and Dad got up out
of a sound sleep, threw on some clothes and insisted on making coffee and
sandwiches for the two.
All
year 'round, but chiefly in the fall and winter it would be necessary to catch
and sell a few of the non-productive chickens. This was done after dark. Dad
and I would go to the chicken house where the hens would be roosting and
asleep. The season for selling roosters was in the spring, so they were already
sold. Dad would have his chicken hook, a six-foot length of stiff wire with a
hook bent into one end. It would have to be large enough to snare a chicken's
leg and small enough so the chicken's foot would not slip out.
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| Young chicks in the brooder house. |
So
here we are, Dad and I prowling around in the dark, with a flashlight, Dad with
the hook and me holding a burlap bag that we always called a gunny sack. Dad
would snare the chicken of his choice and I would have to hold the sack open to
stuff in the chicken. The sack would hold five or six chickens, and it became a
challenge to hold the sack open, simultaneously closing it enough to prevent
the escape of the already bagged birds. This prowling around in the hen-houses
had to be at night because a wide-awake chicken can outrun a man, and as a last
resort can fly up into a nearby tree. This chicken-catching at night was done
by all the farmers who had chickens (most of them), and people driving by at
night would think nothing of prowlers and flashlights in the chicken houses.
This proved to be a boon to chicken thieves who would wait until they saw the
farmer's car leave, then go into the chicken house and snatch all they could in
a short time. The grocery store buyers couldn't tell if the contents of the
sacks (or cages) were legal or stolen.
I
shouldn't admit this, but the gossip was that some distant Plucker relative of
ours who lived on the other side of Parker, somewhere about 30 miles away, was
one of those thieves.
Northern
States Power Company finally came through to our farm with electricity in 1948.
I had already left for college but strangely enough, in the summer time when
they came to turn on the switches, I was the only family member present, so I
had to sign for this important service. Now, after all these years, a
flood-light for the yard became possible, as did an electric pump for the water
pressure necessary for indoor plumbing, even an "electric" radio. But
all of this was too late to benefit me, as I was off to college, the Army, a
teaching job, my future.
