STORIES FROM THE FARM

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

 

 

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. 

http://radio.macinmind.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=180
Coronado Radio - 1937

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


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.

 

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.

  



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.

 

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.

 

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.