My Memoir of the Farm

My name is Daniel Lee Nagengast, and I was born in Sidney, Nebraska, at the public hospital in the Spring of 1951. I am the third issue of my parents, Elmer Charles Nagengast and Bennie Maxine Mitchell. We farmed on the American High Plains, about 15 miles north of Potter, Nebraska, a burg of about 300 people. The farm is also west of Dalton, Nebraska, about 13 miles. I was proceeded in birth by my sister, Mary Lynne and brother James Joseph, four and three years older, respectively. My younger sister, Linda Ann came along just before my third birthday.

A story is told of me about a vacation when I was very young. I could walk or toddle, I guess, but it is not in my memory. We went to Arkansas and Memphis to visit my mother’s family and friends. I was unhappy about the whole deal, and I would repeatedly ask to be let down. “Want down! Want down!” If I was put down I would start running down the highway as fast as I could.

My first memories are pulling a Buzzy Bee pull-toy along the basement floor of our house; sitting under my mother’s ironing board as she ironed and listened to Arthur Godfrey on the radio; and, while sharing a bedroom with my older siblings, flicking the light switch on above my crib, making them cry and causing a commotion. That last project happened twice before the furniture was rearranged and I was no longer near the switch.

I also remember my grandfather, Joseph Nagengast visiting, and then moving in to care for us for awhile, while my mother gave birth to my younger sister. I remember visiting at the hospital after Linda was born, and jumping on my mother’s stomach as she lay in bed, causing her distress.

I recall when my grandmother died in Scottsbluff. She was my dad’s stepmother. My younger sister and I were left with our neighbors, Ivan and Ann Walker, while my parents went up for a couple of days to arrange the funeral. I recall crying that I wanted to go back to where I used to live.

One other vivid memory entails a picnic at the Walker’s ranch, some property they owned in the scenic breaks near Courthouse and Jailhouse Rocks. This was about 15 miles north of our farm. Pumpkin Creek ran through that property, and I recall being carried into the stream to swim with my mom, and I was still in diapers. Maybe it’s a false memory, but its there.

I recall a festival day in Potter one summer - Potter Days. My parents left me and my older sister and brother to watch a movie at the American Legion Hall. They drove with my baby sister to watch a ball game on the west side of town, about 7 blocks away. My siblings were supposed to watch me. I got up and left. My parents were enjoying the game when I showed up at their car door. I don’t know how I knew where they would be.

My older brother and sister started school at a one room school house which was about 3 miles northwest of our place. By the time I reached school age, it had closed, and I started school in Potter, riding the bus on a circuitous route, picking up farm kids all along. It was an hour ride each way. The one room school house remained active for several years after it closed though, as kind of a community center. I attended bible school there a couple of summers. Eventually, it fell into disrepair, or disuse, and the fixtures were auctioned off. My dad scored the 3-holer boys outhouse, and brought it home on a trailer to replace his one-holer. He dug a new, more commodious (ha ha) pit, and we benefitted from having a choice of thrones for the first time. My dad was the main user of the outhouse, although everyone felt free to run out there in a pinch. Though it could theoretically accommodate a crowd, using the outhouse was always a solitary time of reflection. For boys and men, farm life offered ample space for urination, the whole world was our pissoir, but the outhouse was for number 2 when you couldn’t get into the bathroom in the house.

We had electricity, a toilet and running water in the house, though I remember a shocking trip “back east” in the 50s, to visit my father’s brothers and sisters and discovering many of them did not have running water or indoor toilets. Some cousins in Iowa still made homemade soap. Those cousins also had a BB gun they let me play with, and I recall shooting BBs into the soap, I am sure to be discovered later. We felt like modern westerners in comparison to our Eastern Nebraska and Iowa relatives.

As there were 4 small kids, it was common for us all to receive our weekly, Saturday night bath, in the tub at the same time. I cannot imagine the squirm and mess, even though I was an integral part. Years later, as teenagers, my brother and I would rig up a shower on the roof of the garage, complete with a livestock tank heater, so that we could shower off when we came home from field work in the summer. In the winter, once we were in high school, we could shower after football, basketball or track practice. But for 15 years or so, it was a common tussle, fighting for the bathroom in a household of six. As we became too old for communal baths, on Saturday nights, we maneuvered to get our baths while Lawrence Welk was on tv, so that we could be in our jammies, clean and moist when Gunsmoke started. I have to say though, one of my first crushes as a small boy, was on all four of the Lennon Sisters, and Lawrence Welk brought them to me. Lawrence Welk, as it turned out, had played dances in Eastern Nebraska with his band, decades before, when my father was a young man. Lawrence recalled Howells, where my father was from, because of the remarkable stench of the bathrooms in the ballroom, on either side of the stage.

Though Potter was “our” town, we went to church in Dalton, at the First Presbyterian Church. That “First”, though common, was still kind of a pretentious church name for a town of 250 people. It had a Catholic and Lutheran church also, but neither of them claimed to be the first of their kind. Every Sunday, mom would put a pot roast and vegetables into the oven, and we would head to Dalton for Sunday School. We wore our Sunday clothes, and were clean from the Saturday night baths. We kids were dropped off at church for Sunday School, and mom and dad headed to the Dalton Cafe for coffee. There, they schmoozed, ate cinnamon rolls and picked up their reserved copy of the Sunday Denver Post, moseying back to the church an hour later for the service. Because of our connections in Dalton, we had friends who would become rivals of our Potter sports teams as we got older, including our closest neighbor kids.

The pastor had a daughter my age, and we became friends. But eventually, the family moved on, and at some point, we got a new pastoral family. They came, exotically, from Alaska, the preacher, his wife, and 5 children. The littlest one was named Omar. He was maybe 3 or 4 years old. Those kids had never seen a common Nebraska tumbleweed. At one point, Omar caught one and tied it up next to the garage, with a bowl of water in case it got thirsty. That pastor eventually ran off with the church organist, a mother of three. His wife and kids stayed for a bit in the manse, but I think they moved on shortly, with some relief mixed with their grief, and that’s the last we heard of them. The organist’s family, however, were important people, owners of the grocery. And they remained with that sorry story forever hovering.

The third pastor I can remember was a young, sharp guy, just out of seminary. He and his wife moved to Dalton and he was a breath of fresh air, until he mis-stepped. On Mother’s Day, with a church full of families in their best clothes, and mothers in their bonnets, he talked about honoring unwed mothers as well as wed ones, tying in the story of Mary and Jesus. Well, that was the beginning of the end for him. I think at the time, mentioning even the Immaculate Conception was viewed as tainting womankind and motherhood. They were gone within a year, and I wonder if he stayed with the gig.

Neither Potter nor Dalton had a movie theater, or clothes shopping, or swimming pool, or things of that nature. So we would drive to Sidney, Nebraska, 30 miles away, for those big city experiences. Sidney was a town of about 6000 people. It had the hospital where I was born. My father’s bowling team played at Cedar Lanes there.

My father loved bowling. I recall going with him to a 2-lane Duck pins bowling alley above the O.P. Skaggs Grocery in Potter when I was very tiny. Town kids had jobs setting up the pins after each ball, and I remember being fascinated, watching their scurrying hands as they cleaned up the sprawling pins in the lane, and then jumping to a seat above the standing pins, with their legs hanging down. The bowling alley in Sidney was oh so mid-Century modern, with sputnik fixtures and wall designs and molded fiberglass seats. While dad was bowling there, we went to the movies with mom. Dad’s team was The Dalton Farmers, and he was probably the best of them. If our movie got out before dad finished his game, we would go across the street to wait at the Greyhound terminal. As we got progressively older and able to care for ourselves, or if the movie didn’t suit her, mom would sometimes stay with dad at the bowling alley. One time, when by brother was about 14, a male Greyhound passenger tried to pick him up while we were waiting.

I recall one early movie in particular - Perri, The Little Girl Squirrel. It was a Disney nature flick about her anthropomorphized life. So much drama! If you IMDB it, you’ll find that this is the only movie Perri ever made, in 1957. She was Canadian. As part of that evening though, there was a drawing for a model kit of Perri. It had about 10 plastic pieces, and a goopy glue to coat the finished model with, and onto which you sprinkled fake fur. At intermission, the theater owner chose me from the audience to come up on stage and draw a ticket number out of a hat. I did so, and drew my sister Mary’s ticket, so the squirrel came home with us, and floated around our house catching dust for 20 years. I was lucky at drawings. I won a basket full of groceries from O.P. Skaggs at the Potter Day festivities drawing one time. And I also won a helicopter type device that flew straight up for a thousand feet with the aid of a tiny, gasoline-powered model airplane engine.

Sidney had a large and beautiful swimming pool in the park, a rare oasis on the prairie in the baking summer. I can recall the numbered wire baskets in the dressing rooms where we put our clothes, and the matching numbered safety pins on each basket, which you affixed to your suit so you could remember and reclaim your belongings. And there was a foot bath full of milky liquid, that all must pass through when headed to the pool. I think it was for Athletes feet, which must have been a more common plague in those days. Athletes feet’s star seems to have dimmed over the years . Also in that park was a small stream where one could fish for crawdads, using a string and a piece of chicken liver. The crawdads would latch on with their claws, and you could pull them right out. And then you had a crawdad for awhile, until you put it back.

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Part II

For larger shopping or more exotic needs or thrills we went less frequently to Scottsbluff/Gering, also known as the Twin Cities, located in the Nile Valley. The Nile Valley was really, the North Platte River Valley, but there must have been a promoter who decided the Nile had more traction, so that’s what people sometimes called it. There, you would find more clothing, caterpillar tractor parts, a bigger sale barn for livestock, Weber Furniture (“The World’s Largest Furniture Store”), a zoo, and my grandpa and grandma. I remember a model of the Statue of Liberty in a water tower park near grandpa’s home. My mother told a story about walking into the living room there and finding my grandpa trying to give me a shot glass of whiskey when I was about 2. After being berated, he responded, “But he asked for it.” On shopping trips to Scottsbluff, we would often eat lunch at the Overland Cafe, which was on the ground floor of a downtown office building. At least some of the waiters were Chinese, though the menu was strictly burgers and chips, or roast beef sandwiches. In the afternoon, while dad ran errands, we often were treated to a swim at the YMCA indoor swimming pool, which featured a giant slide. My mother loved to swim and would stay with us. The best thing at the nearby zoo, along the river, was an elevated Prairie Dog town. You could crawl underneath it and pop up in a plexiglass dome right in the middle of town, just like the other dogs.

Between Scottsbluff and Gering was Terrytown, a private shopping strip owned by Terry Carpenter, a businessman, who, for many years, was the Democratic Representative to Congress from Western Nebraska. I recall Terry promoting a visit to Terrytown by the Smothers Brothers, who were all the rage, so we timed a shopping trip to Scottsbluff to coincide. We had a couple of their naughty comedy albums which we must have listened to till they wore out. (Sample: “I’m a boatman, gee I’m sore. I came home without an oar!”). Anyway, we joined a crowd standing in a parking lot. A tour bus pulled up, and the Smothers Brothers got out and made wise cracks for about 15 minutes, and then they blasted off. Big city culture had come to the High Plains!

One time, when I was a young teenager, we sent a semi truckload of cattle to the small beef packing plant in Scottsbluff. We had loaded the cattle that morning, driving them up the cattle chute into the back of the semi-truck. We then piled into our car and met the truck at the plant to help unload. The semi backed up to the loading chute there, and the cattle were filing out in an orderly fashion, when the driver mistakenly thought someone signaled that the truck was empty and he could pull away. I was standing nearby and suddenly, there was a 900# steer with its front legs on the chute and its back legs on the departing truck, about 5’ off the ground. I truly recognized puzzlement and chagrin on the face of that steer as it’s front and back legs stretched farther and farther apart. Eventually it fell between, and took off running down the streets of that fair city, with a farmer and his boys trying to corral him, and fortunately we eventually did before it could make the evening news.

Some of our shopping came to us. In the 1950s, there were still traveling salesmen who would show up irregularly at the farmstead. One was the Fuller Brush salesman. He was an older gentleman in a large, black car. I remember the car as having a long, sloping back. It was crammed full of notions, household goods and cleansers, sponges, brushes, cutlery and other wares that helped keep a house on the prairie in trim. I believe he always had a treat for the kids, and he and mom were on a first name basis. It was so exciting when he showed up, and mom always encouraged him by buying a few things. He was the last of his kind.

A guy who sold axle grease, oil and other products that farmers use would also show up every year or two. He was in a truck and could roll 55 gallon drums of grease off. We had a pump that could be mounted on a drum, and was used to fill grease guns directly. Eventually, these were replaced by a cartridge system, and now there are tons of waste from that. You could also buy kerosene and solvents in 5 gallon cans, which became gasoline or diesel cans for hauling fuel to the field, where tractors were filled with the use of funnels. Gasoline and diesel generally came in bulk in a truck from the Coop. Every farm had a couple of 500 gallon tanks on stilts, that were filled with those fuels, non-taxed, encouragement for the farmers, thanks to the farm lobbyists.

One day, perhaps just as I was learning to read, an encyclopedia salesman showed up. In addition to the Encyclopedia, he also had the multi-volume set of The Book of Knowledge. The latter was heavily illustrated, and took you instantly to exotic places and long-lost times. That set took up about two linear feet of book sheIf, and I read them multiple times. Any of us kids could be absorbed by those books for hours. The whole setup came with a nice wooden book shelf, and I remember my parents debating whether they could afford them, while we kids drooled excitedly. They sat proudly in our living room for the next 30 years.

Part III

All but one of the trees on our family farmstead were there at the hand of earlier homesteaders, or my mom and dad. My parents planted our windbreak, soon after they moved there to farm in 1948. They came at the invitation of my California aunt, (my dad’s older sister) and her kids. My father had lived and worked on that farm as a hired man when younger. My aunt’s husband fell into alcoholism and abuse, and eventually she took the kids and moved to California to get away, where other siblings had a bridgehead. They never came back, but when her husband died, she offered the chance to farm to my dad, and he grabbed it, moving back out to Nebraska from L.A, where he had met my mom..

I think there were three lines of trees that ran up the west side of the farmstead to the county road on the north, about 1/4 mile in length. There were two rows of elms and a row of shorter cedar trees on the east side. The purpose of a windbreak, no surprise, is to break the incessant prairie wind. The down wind side, once broken, would then swirl which caused snow to settle in drifts, rather than continuing on to block the lane. Everything grew better when protected from the wind. Many of the windbreaks on the plains were put in during the 30s, in some areas to prevent a reoccurrence of the dust bowl. Eleanor Roosevelt was a big promoter of wind breaks. In addition to stimulating plant growth around farmsteads, the windbreaks probably also helped to decrease suicide and divorce. My parents watered those trees for a couple of years to get them to grow. They would put 50 gallon drums of water on the haying sled and drag them behind the tractor. Mom would drive, I believe, and dad would water each tree with a bucket. I played in those trees a lot as a kid.

On a grassy prairie that had become field after field of mono-cropped wheat or clean summer fallow, they provided sanctuary for birds and small animals. I set out some steel traps there once, to try and catch rabbits, but got lucky and didn’t. Then I worried that Terry, our dog, would get her foot snapped, so I put a fence around the traps to keep her out. I clearly didn’t think it through. I would sometimes find Mourning Dove nests in the low branches, with an egg or two, and I would never disturb those. Their call was a sweet sound track to our summer days. The Western Meadlowlarks, perched on fence posts or tall grass stems, had another distinctive call that I hold in my mind.

I once dug a “cave” in the deep topsoil amongst those trees, in a little fenced pasture we had behind our shop buildings. I was probably about 10 or 11 years old. No one else in the family, except Terry, knew about it. It was about 4’ deep and I covered it with sheet metal and a big disk from a one-way plow. I would go hide there and fantasize about what I was doing. One day, a calf fell in. It was unhurt, but it couldn’t get out, and dad found it. He made me fill it in, and that was that.

Cattle

We often had calves around the place, because we had two milk cows - Rose and Alice. They were registered Milking Shorthorns. In those days, good farmers, even ones with two cows, engaged in breed improvement. They bought cows with the characteristics they wanted, and they searched for bulls in the same way. Over time, the livestock on an individual farm improved. Milking Shorthorns are a British, mixed service breed (milk and beef). The cows are docile. They are big and blocky, with short horns for farmer safety, and they had good milk producing capabilities. They are often kind of a brindled chocolate/liver and white color.

Commercial dairies today generally just run Holsteins, which produce the most milk. Any other characteristic is of little interest. The life of a dairy cow on a large commercial dairy now is short and joyless, milked till they burn out in 2 or 3 gestations. But our cows were part of the family. I mean, come on, Rose and Alice! A major dairy advertising icon of my youth was Elsie, the Contented Cow, who was always pictured on lush, green pastures. Beside still waters.

In order for a cow to lactate, they need to have a calf of course, so ours were bred each year. And we needed a registered bull in order to have calves with an improved and documented blood line. Milking Shorthorn bulls were not as noted for their docility. They could be dangerous. Anyway, once they calved, the cows gave much more milk than a single calf could use. The calves would be gradually weaned, while we continued to milk their mothers. The calves were still given some milk, but also, milk replacement, until they could digest plant matter. Every year, in addition to the calves born on the farm dad would buy a few other calves to feed and eventually sell. Every year, each of the 4 kids - my older sister and brother, myself, and my younger sister, were allowed to choose a calf of our own. The proceeds from the eventual sale of the calves would belong to us. We generally made our selections on childish things like color or markings or friendliness. We were often down among the calves, and they would love to lick our hands, and take our whole hands in their mouths and just suckle, drawing you in quite a way up the arm. We believed it was because of the salt on our active little bodies, but they really did seem to mimic nursing. Scary the first time you let a critter as big as you start to swallow you.

I recall climbing up on the bull shed roof once, to tease one of the string of shorthorn bulls we owned over the years. Bulls were the most dangerous animal on the farm, though my mother had made dad get rid of the hogs when children came along, for fear we would be eaten. You think I’m kidding. Anyway, the bulls were big and beefy, mottled on the back haunches and chocolate colored in the front, as were the cows. They could be temperamental. That particular bull had a bald spot, and I recall mocking him and calling him baldy from the safety of the roof. Suddenly he backed up, pawed the earth, and charged forward, butting into the small shed, rocking it and almost knocking me off. I slid quietly down the back side of the shed and ran away, never to goad a bull again.

A different bull got out once, and got into my mom’s garden, which was surrounded with snow fencing. It was running back and forth, trampling everything. And of course it was dangerous. It would have been dad’s to deal with, but he was far away on the tractor. We huddled up and vowed to gently encourage the thing back in. My older sister, brother, mother and I managed to get him back where he belonged, but the danger was palpable.

At one point we had several cows which were not for milking, but for calf production. That is sometimes called a Cow-Calf operation. Anyway, my brother and I were helping dad on a muddy, cold fall day. We were running them through the squeeze chute for some reason, maybe vaccinations. One of those cows refused to cooperate, and wouldn’t be penned. Dad, out of frustration, picked up a cobblestone from a load which we had spread near the feed bunk to counteract the mud. He heaved it at the cow and caught her in the side of the head. She collapsed in a heap and laid on her side, with crap pouring out of her. My dad thought he had killed a $1000 dollars. I had never seen him express such remorse. Eventually she came to, and got up. She, and we, were all the wiser about animal husbandry.

Milking the cows was a morning and evening task that was inescapable. The milking machines in our day had the brand name Surge, and the whole apparatus included an enclosed, flat stainless tank with a handle that hung under the cow on a belt called a surcingle. There were stainless encased rubber tubes which fitted over each teat and attached to the tank,. A vacuum pump hypnotically drew the milk out of the teats with a regular beat. The sound of a milking machine is unique, and I don’t know if anyone who never milked is familiar with it, but people with dairy cows knew it. It was very lulling. Milk barns often had cats hanging around, drawn to the scent of the milk. We did not give them any milk, but we did push off the foamy froth into a pan, and they eagerly devoured it. The milk was then run through a cream separator, which was really just a centrifuge, and the cream was collected in a separate, smaller cream can. The milk went into large milk cans and all were placed in a fridge. There was a small hot water heater in the milk barn, and everything got sterilized and hung up to dry at the end of milking. The milk and cream that we did not use, went to the Dalton Grocery, with the eggs.

When the cows eventually quit dropping milk, they were allowed to loaf a bit, and then it was time to breed them again.

In later years, my father would buy, maybe 80 to 120 fall calves, if the bankers went along with it. We would put up electric fence around the nearby wheat stubble and the green crop of next summer’s wheat, growing through the winter. Every morning the calves would trail out to graze, perhaps come in once for water, and then traipse in for certain in the evening where hay awaited in a long, open area we called the haymow, though it was uncovered. It was lined on two sides with bunks where they fed. A giant stack of baled hay, in small bales, was kept in the middle. Rainfall was rare enough that the hay never got spoiled. We fed from the top so there was little chance of the bales getting soaked, left, and ruined. Those calves were fattened and then sent to the meat packer in Scottsbluff, except for one. We kept the best and took it to the locker plant in Potter, which butchered it, wrapped the cuts in labeled white paper, and kept them in the meat locker we rented. Periodically, we would go fetch meat for a month, and bring it out to store in our freezer at the farm.

Part IV

My mother and father met in Los Angeles. Right when they were to be married, he was offered the chance to return and farm and live on the place in the Panhandle where he had been a hired man. Aunt Mary had also invited my dad out to California some years after she left Nebraska and her marriage. Because there were several of his brothers and sisters running around in the Los Angeles basin in the late 30s and early 40s, it made sense for him to seek his fortune there. He had very bad eyes and was unfit for the military, but he found work in various munitions factories, including at least one that plated parts for aircraft. At her husband’s death, Aunt Mary asked dad if he would return and farm the Nebraska place, and it was the offer that made his life.

My mother was from Arkansas, and she had grown up in the trees. She also was a depression era migrant to California, along with her mother. They ran a gas station with another Arkansas friend for awhile. At one point, my mother, grandmother, and a friend of theirs, were mowed down by a drunk driver in L.A. Mom was in a hip cast for a long time. Mom and dad met in the final years of World War II. They agreed to marry in Las Vegas and then move on to make their lives on the farm in Western Nebraska. The first time mom ever visited the treeless plains, was when she moved there to live on our isolated farmstead. She found herself alone with dad, 15 miles from town, and a couple of miles from the nearest neighbor. When she arrived, she did not know how to drive. They ordered baby chicks, and after they came in the mail, my mother would go sit and cry over them in the brooder house, while dad drove the caterpillar in the field all day. That was farm life and had been settler life for most of the white, prairie pioneers. I don’t think any of that was thought through very well.

Chickens

Chickens were always present. For awhile, we had a big white rooster. I hesitate to call him a pet, but he was my defender. When I was 6-8 years old, my big brother would pick on me. If the rooster was around, it would attack my brother with a vengeance, chasing him across the farmstead. I remember one time Jim was aggressively teasing me, and that rooster chased him for 100 yards, treeing him on top of the fence gate down by the barn. I offer that critter my belated thanks.

In later days, it was rare for us to keep a rooster, because our hens were for laying purposes, and fertilized eggs were spoiled for our market. The chickens were considered to be mom’s. My mother would buy 150 unsexed day-old chicks in late winter. They would be dropped off by the mailman in a large cheeping box. I’d like to see Amazon deal with that! Unsexed, means that they were a straight-run mix of male and female. It was possible to get all female for a higher price. We would put them in a small, metal-sided shack, the brooder house, on a straw-covered floor, held within a large cardboard ring that stood about 18’’ tall, and 10’ across. There was a heat lamp suspended low over them with white, and what we called “infrared” bulbs to keep them warm. There was a chick feeder, which was a long galvanized trough, with a rotating set of blades or fans that ran its length, designed to spin if they got on it, and keep them from standing in their food and befouling it, ha ha. There were also small waterers, with shallow enough trays that they could not drown themselves. And a mineral block, brand name Peebles, which was about 10” square and had the consistency of modeling clay. It was kind of brick red. The chicks would peck at it, and the block would take on a fantastic shape, reflecting their random peck marks, with holes and arches and blow outs reminiscent of slot canyons in the Southwest. Cattle do the same think with their tongues on the harder mineral blocks or salt blocks that they are provided. A few years back I saw where those partially consumed mineral blocks were being sold as art objects to city folk.

The chicks would grow as spring came on, and eventually, they became big enough to go outside. We let them roam the farmstead. Gradually, you could distinguish between the hens and roosters, by their size and combs. Also, the roosters began to act roostery. As they got larger, we would begin to select out and butcher the roosters. They were small birds at that age, much smaller than you would find in a grocery store today. About 3 of them would make a meal for our family of six. Plenty of legs, thighs and breasts to go around.

They were killed either with a small axe, by laying their head on a stump, and…..you know. Or they had their necks wrung. That entailed holding them by the head and swinging their bodies in a circle until the head came off. In either case, the chickens would still operate for a minute or two, flying around or running crazily, sometimes even squawking. There is an old saying: “He was running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off”. Well, this is where it came from.

Once the roosters were butchered and eaten directly, all that was left were the hens, generally numbering 75 to a hundred or so, which were called pullets as they began to lay eggs. The eggs were small, and since these chickens were allowed to run and scavenge, they were laid in nesting sites everywhere around the farm. The eggs were quite good, with bright yellow yolks, but they were for home use only, too small for trade. As kids, one of our jobs was to find and collect those eggs every evening. We knew every square inch of that farm and all its outbuildings, but occasionally, a pullet would have a nest deep within a hay stack and we wouldn’t find it till there were 20 or so eggs. Those were still fine for our use. They were unfertilized (no roosters), and when you stumbled across such a trove, you were very excited to show mom all the eggs you gathered. Every evening, in addition to collecting the eggs, we also had to chase all the pullets back into the brooder house for the evening, made easier by feeding and watering them at that time, so they were eager. Leaving them out invited predators.

The prior year’s hens were still on the farm, as these young ones came on, and they were kept in the chicken house, a separate building which had a large, fenced and treed run. The layers had access to that run throughout the day through a small, chicken sized port. Every evening, they were herded in, and the port was blocked to keep them safe from skunks, coyotes and badgers. One time Terry, who slept outside, made a terrible racket in the middle of the night. Dad went out with a flashlight and his shotgun, and found a badger had forced its way in through that door. It had been climbing up on the roost and had snatched about 5 or 6 chickens and carried them out, still living and unharmed, and lined them up for a feast. The chickens just sat there, frozen in fright in the middle of the night. That badger didn’t get his feast. We heard the shotgun blast in our beds.

The chicken house had laying boxes where they nested, and an indoor roost where they spent the night. The boxes were cubbies filled with straw, and you could put your hand in to collect the eggs each night. The roost was kind of a slanted cabinet, with a 6’ surface that stretched from about 3 high in the front to 5’ in the back. A series of poles were perched about a foot up, each the length of the cabinet, and every one a bit higher. If you visited the roost at night you would find lines of chickens perched on those polls, like fans in the bleachers at a football game. When we cleaned out the chicken house periodically, it required taking a garden hoe, and pulling the brown and white chicken manure down the cabinet underneath the poles and onto the ground, where it could be carried out by the shovelful to the manure spreader. My dad had one joke that he told every time we cleaned the chicken house. “Do you know what they call that white stuff in chicken shit?” ? “Chicken shit!”

My first agricultural chore as a child of 5, was to feed and water those chickens every evening. It required walking down across the barnyard 250 feet or so, to one of the granaries, and filling a metal 5 gallon bucket that long ago, held axle grease, with oats, then staggering it back up to the house to fill the feeder. I would have to stop and rest numerous times. The chicken feeder was similar to the chick feeder, but had a wire tent over the trough, allowing them to eat, but not perch. I also had to fill an old 3-legged cast iron cooking pot with oyster shells, which provided the minerals they needed to make egg shells. I personally think that the white stuff in chicken shit is oyster shells. It is interesting to speculate how coastal oyster shells became an agricultural input in the middle of the country. Finally, I had to carry two, 4 gallon buckets of water from the hydrant on the house to the waterer in the chicken shed, which perched on an electric heating pan, to keep it from freezing. I was too small to really carry that much weight, but I would swing the bucket up and set it down ahead, then do it again, and I would get there, with a lot of spillage. Eventually, as I got older, I could carry it in a stagger, alternating from arm to arm, but my jeans legs would just be soaked from the spill. On winter evenings, my pants would freeze and become a hard shingle of ice that I happened to be walking around in. I still find it hard to believe that one so young was trusted and expected to do this, but I did it because I did not know that I could not.

Occasionally, a hen would get the urge to set on her eggs and try and hatch them, even though they were unfertilized and the effort was futile. Mother nature was calling, but she had the wrong number. When this happened, hens made a peculiar clucking sound, and so they were called “clucks”. The cure was to segregate them away from their eggs in the nesting boxes and from the other hens. The thought was it might have been contagious behavior. For this, we had yet a third chicken structure, the cluck house. The cluck house was the size of the 3-hole outhouse, sans commode. It had a slatted, jailhouse door. There the clucks would stay until they quit clucking, and then they were put back with the rest.

Once, we came across an injured wild mallard duck. She recuperated in the cluck house until she could fly again.

For taking the eggs to town, my mother had a wooden egg crate with cardboard dividers, that allowed you to transport maybe 10 dozen eggs. It was a cube with handles on each plywood side. I believe it was provided to us by the grocery. Once a week we took the eggs, along with a couple of cans of milk and the cream can, to the Dalton Grocery, run by the Heizer family. The eggs were candled by Grandpa Heizer. They were put on a kind of wire carousel , a machine that separated and cradled each egg. The lines of eggs were rotated in front of a very bright light, allowing you to somewhat see through the opaque shell to detect if a chick had started to develop. Once assured that they weren’t fertile, they were packaged by the dozen and put out in a cooler for sale in the grocery. Grandpa Heizer was a kindly old man. I remember he was missing several fingers on his hand, and it was engrossing to watch him pick up eggs with just a single finger and thumb.

The milk and cream was sent off on the “milk train” to Sterling, Colorado, and I imagine it eventually made its way to Denver homes in glass bottles. We received a credit for the milk and eggs which were used to buy that week’s store-bought groceries. Those consisted of whatever else was needed by a family that also grew its own chickens, beef and vegetables. Mom often baked our own bread, and she canned vegetables and bushels of fruit in quart jars. We bought potatoes from the Platte River Valley north of us, near Scottsbluff. You could buy a 100# burlap bag of potatoes for $1, right out in the field. We would buy several hundred pounds each fall, always giving a bag to our pastor’s family at church. So what groceries did we buy at the Grocery? Jello. Coffee. Oranges. Orange Juice. Syrup. Ice cream. Cereal.

The Dalton Grocery had a door in back behind the cold foods coolers, which opened into a dry goods store, that fronted the next street. You could walk right through from one business to the next. In that store you could buy cloth and notions and jeans. It was a real relic from frontier days. My dad bought his Red Wing boots there, that came from Red Wing, Minnesota, up on the Mississippi. His boots were commonly called clod hoppers. They were round toed, with little arch support. Nearby ranchers or cattlemen wouldn’t be caught dead in those. They wore pointed cowboy boots with high heels, to go along with their pearl-snapped shirts and cowboy hats. But dirt farmer wore clod hoppers, overalls, and plain, billed caps. In summer, my father had a permanent tan line running sideways across the middle of his forehead from that cap - white above, ruddy below.

But, I digress. Those older hens eventually quit laying in the fall, so they were butchered over several weeks in late, late summer. They were frozen, and we had a large, stand up freezer for them, which also contained packages of frozen beef from the locker plant in town. Butchering was my moms and my sisters work. It was hard and disgusting, boiling the birds, plucking the feathers, gutting them cutting them up. They must have really liked chicken.

There was one other flock of chickens living quite independently of us on our farm. We had about 6-10 Bantie hens, a rooster and chicks, that lived down in the small barn where we stored hay and sheltered spring calves. That flock was never fed, never butchered, we collected no eggs and they were rarely bothered. They were allowed to come and go as they pleased, and generations of them were a presence. Bantie is short for Bantam. They were a small breed, with a big attitude. They were the Chihuahuas of the fowl world. If you wanted to mess with them, they seemed always ready to have a go. They served to paw through the cattle manure, eating bugs and pass-through grain. I think they eventually died out after about 20 years, when they entered a rooster-less stretch, and the hens could no longer be bred.

Part V

The Garden

Bennie was a gardener. However, Nebraska, unlike New Jersey, was never called “The Garden State”. We had brutal winters with high winds and heavy blizzards. We had brutal summers with high winds, little rain and high temperatures. There were four distinctive seasons, but rainfall was so scant there were few trees to glorify spring and fall.

The winters and hard freezes did ease the next summers garden though, by mellowing the deep grey soils of the prairie and killing many insect pests. If you could get a plant up, water it, and protect it from the wind, you could grow some vegetables. In the irrigated river valley and aquifer irrigated lands to the north of us in the Panhandle, farms grew potatoes, sugar beets and pinto beans. The North Platte Valley was a productive place for those crops generally grown in higher elevations, or in the Pacific Northwest.

The garden moved once during my years on the farm, probably because the soil just got depleted. But in either place, every year Dad would take 30 minutes with the caterpillar and plow, often when passing through the farmstead from one field to another in the spring, and turn the garden. We kids would then go out with hoes and rakes, breaking up clods and leveling the soil. We surrounded the garden with snow fencing made of 2” wide wooden slats wired together, and died red. It made a fairly impermeable fence 4 feet tall, that rabbits couldn’t get through. The same fence is often used on the plains along highways where snow drifts are a problem. They are set up on the north side of the road, where the blizzards come from, and they stop the wind, create eddies, and the snow piles up there, and not on the road. Like a seasonal wind break. Snow drifts were a big part of life on the prairie, and snow fencing was common..

Once the ground was prepared, mom then would transplant tomatoes and peppers, and sow beans, peas, carrots, beets, sweet corn, and other common vegetables. On the south and west side of each transplant, she would stick a wooden shingle to form a wind break. Without this, the plants were buffeted continually, and would not thrive. The garden was watered almost every day. One can only imagine the frustration of the settlers that came here, broke up the prairie, and tried to recreate European homesteads. The Pawnee, Arapahoe and Cheyenne were grass-based and semi-migratory. They lived with the grain, not against it.

In summer, our table would have all kinds of fresh vegetables. Mom also canned and froze all summer long. Our house had a basement, but it had a cellar, even deeper than the basement. It was accessed through a door on the stairway down, and it was a deep, dark hole, with oversized concrete steps, 18” or more in height. There was a single light bulb. At the bottom, maybe 12 to 15 feet below the earth’s surface, were some wooden racks, with rows of glass canning jars, filled with fruit and vegetables, and covered in dust and spider webs. It was a difficult and eerie thing for a child to descend down and come back up with fruit for the table. The cellar also served as our tornado shelter, and we spent many a night huddled in the dark as the wild storms passed over us. There was no weather service providing warnings, or televised maps. If it got bad, we headed down and huddled there like badgers, or prairie dogs, or 10 year old boys who found themselves on a prairie, waiting for the storm to pass so we could emerge and see what happened.

Infrastructure

A mere 150 feet deeper below our place lies the Oglala Aquifer. A source of sweet, cold abundant water. Now, it is overly used and in danger of depletion in some areas of the Great Plains, because of the irrigation pivots that have changed the geometric farming landscape from right angles to round. But, at the time, the Aquifer was used solely for farmsteads - household and livestock water and gardens. We had a towering wooden windmill down near the barns, which made the homestead viable. The beams of the windmill were 8 x 8 or 10 x 10 and maybe 50 feet long. Very solid, and painted white. At the top was a reliable Dempster blade array and gear box. A windmill is engaged by turning it directly into the wind. But a windmill could be destroyed if left to face into a too strong wind, so it was only engaged when needed. To face it into the wind, you needed to lock the tail in place. Down at the base was a lever attached to a long stiff wire. As a child, I was too light to pull it down, but by the time I was 12 or so, I could. It would swing the tail out, holding it rigid at a right angle to the revolving blades. The wind would catch the tail and force the blades to face directly into the wind, and they would start turning. The gear box translated that circular motion into an up and down motion, that was linked all the way down to the pump head on the ground by a long wooden rod. The pump rod would start pulling up and down. The creaking windmill turning and the pump head rhythmically pumping was another very distinctive sound on the farmstead. The pump would fill a 15 foot high, round metal, silver-painted tank, storing water for times when the wind did not blow. The tank was sealed and topped with a flattish conical roof. It was always cool to the touch in the summer, but not as cold as the water coming out of the ground. There was an overflow pipe outlet at the top, and when the tank was full, you would see and hear it splashing as it dropped to the ground, and you would know to shut the windmill down. On some old homesteads, you might see a tank lodged high up in the windmill, an integrated water tower providing water pressure from gravity. Our tank sat at the bottom of a rise, below the house, so we needed an electric pump in the basement of the house, to bring it from the tank up to the house and give us water pressure.

We had a septic system that consisted of maybe a hundred yards of ceramic laterals that were buried beneath the farmstead yard, where cars turned around. I know they were about 5’ deep, because they finally gummed up, and my brother and I spent one summer digging down and uncovering them by hand with pickaxes and shovels. Hard, hard soil, and not, uh, pleasant work. It tore up the yard completely and cars could not turn there. The day those were flushed and reburied was a good day.

We also had a separate grey water tank that held the water used by the clothes washer. It needed to be emptied once or twice a year, with an electric pump affixed to a long rigid pipe that was powered with extension cords.

Clothes were dried on a wooden clothes line, with maybe four, 30’ lengths of number 9 wire. Clothes pins were an everyday object in my childhood.

When my parents moved to the farm, there was no electrical hookup. I don’t know if the REA - Rural Electrification Association - was extant, but power lines electrifying our farm reached sometime between 1948 and the early 1950s. Prior to that, there was a blade-driven wind charger, which rose on a steel tower behind the house. It had a 16 foot propeller, which was still in the rafters of the hog house on our abandoned farm, the last time I visited. It was connected to an array of large batteries in the basement of the house, and probably provided enough juice for lighting, a radio, and maybe a fridge. Once we got REA, we took down the charger and used the same metal tower for our TV antenna.

The furnace was a propane, gravity furnace, which required no electricity. It kept us warm even when the electricity went out, common in the winter. We also had a propane stove. There were times when the kitchen stove helped to warm the house, with the oven door wide open. A time or two, the baby chicks were brought in and corralled in front of the stove when the electricity was out and their heat lamp didn’t function. For that matter, a calf or two spent time in the basement during some of the most severe blizzards.

My dad worked with a team of men to run telephone lines out to all the rural farmsteads. It was some kind of self-help cooperative. We had a common phone line with everyone else, then known as a party line. Everyone’s phone rang for every call, but with a different ring, and you knew your ring. I seem to recall two longs and two shorts for us, but I could be wrong. Regardless, you always had to assume that someone else was surreptitiously listening, carefully picking up the phone to eavesdrop. Sometimes you would hear a cough or a dog bark that didn’t sound like it was coming from the person you were talking to. There were suspected gossipy neighbors. Of course, you could be guilty of tying up the line with long phone calls too. And sometimes someone would break in when their patience had worn and they needed to make a call. Politeness dictated your ending your call shortly, when someone picked up to see if the line was busy. When I reached high school age, there were long phone calls with my girlfriend, but neither of us had enough worldly experience to have much to say, so the calls were mostly companionable silence, and eventually the you-hang-up-no-you-hang-up goodbye.

Part VI

Play

Our familial band of kids had only so many things we could do, and Terry, (and later Ginny), our farm dog, was always with us. We were 15 miles from a small town, and a mile or more from the nearest neighbor. The closest kids were three miles away. So having stuff to do entailed thinking up stuff to do.

Some of those things were physically taxing. We used to walk to a distant field, almost a mile away, on top of a low plateau we called the mesa. The mesa was farmland with a field up top, and a uneven bullseye of terraced fields and alternating grasslands circling it down. One particular terrace had a low spot, where rainwater would congregate. A rainwater puddle was a seldom-seen thing.

Anyway, some of those scarce rains formed that little mud hole on the terrace, and some cottonwood seeds blew in from far away, and a couple of trees took root. They never amounted to much. But on the square mile of former prairie where we lived, other than The Big Tree, referenced below, those were the only trees not planted by humans. My sisters and brother and Ginny and I would fill up a quart jar of drinking water, grab some steak knives and a hatchet, and trek out to those cottonwoods. The same wisp of water also nourished some sunflowers, often 8 feet tall or more. We would cut these, trim them, and drag them back to the farmstead, where they became lodgepoles for blanket teepees.

These were probably not the first teepees on that place. The farmstead had an unusual seep of surface water. If one can imagine the great sweep of prairie that covered Western Nebraska pre-white incursion, there would have been miles and miles of low, grass-covered, treeless hills, nestled in the wedge between the large channels of the North and South Platte Rivers. The North Platte came out of Wyoming and headed southeast, now through Lake McConnahey to join up near Ogallala with the South Platte, coming from the Continental Divide in Colorado. Other than those two braided rivers, there were only streams - Pumpkin Creek, Lodgepole Creek, - but no real lakes. Surface water was scarce. But our farm had that small seep, and surely it had always attracted animals and people.

The seep was a sort of spring, perhaps a perched aquifer, or maybe just a low spot fed by the surrounding low hills. There was rarely standing water, but there was generally mud, and the tree we called The Big Tree grew there as a kind of sentinel, an advertisement that there was water close to the surface. Consequently, it had probably been a good place to camp, long before the homesteaders arrived in the late 1870s, when it became a good place to homestead. This was Pawnee territory, though not continually occupied. There are tales involving Sioux and Pawnee conflict less than 20 miles to the north, at Courthouse and Jailhouse Rock. Certainly the Sioux were involved in several battles with the U.S. Cavalry, not far from there. The Arapahoe and Cheyenne surely passed this way from time to time.

There were no hard rock sources nearby, so arrowheads and stone tools were readily visible when the grass was removed and the ground plowed. I have several beautiful stone tools, including a large granite maul, found in the fields. Several were found in the chicken yard, where the hens had removed all the grass, but others were found here and there around the place. These seem like they would have been valuable things to lose, and missed once they were gone. Most of the stone came from the Rocky Mountains or Black Hills, far away, and they had clearly been worked.

The Big Tree was ours for climbing and building tree houses. Below it was where we pitched our teepees, or harvested the hollow stems of hemlock for sword fighting. We built a rest in the top branches, and it was not uncommon to see the heads of 3 kids sticking out of the top of the tree. It was our lookout, though we were in dire need of things to look out for.

As far as the eye could see would be a checkerboard of wheat fields and summer fallow. Winter wheat is an unusually vivid crop, perhaps because it is often found green in dry treeless winter areas like the Russian Steppes. It seems to leap out at you. In winter, it is low-lying and maintains a bright lawn green. The only color besides tans, grey and buff at that time of year. Come spring and it sends up panicles and it takes on a darker green, like Charleston Green. Then the heads pop out and beard up, and there is a waving grey fringe. Finally, the wheat ripens to a shockingly beautiful golden color. That checkerboard just mutates all summer long. If it does rain, the summer fallow fields go from a buff color to rich black soil until it dries out again. There were also rye fields and other crops, each with their own texture and time of ripening. Rye is notable for its blue/green coloration. Depending on the day and season, the monotony of the farmed plains changes regularly.

One of our games entailed crawling through that 2 foot tall wheat, matting down trails, and trying to pop up and surprise each other. Perhaps that was what The Big Tree lookout was good for. This was, of course, detrimental to the wheat crop, but our dad, and our neighbor, indulged it. Probably because they themselves had once been farm kids alone with nothing to amuse them.

Every once in a great while we would get a hard, long, soaking rain. Low lying areas and bar pits ( barrows - the ditches along roads) would fill, and water would stand. There were ephemeral fauna, that would lie in hibernation for years, and suddenly emerge when this would happen. I recall one rain that came hard and furious, under a dark cloud that blocked the daylight. It was accompanied by lightening, and as we stood and looked out the window across our yard, we could see hundreds of frogs, where there had never been frogs before. When the lightning lessened, we rushed out in the rain and started to grab them. We had a little Tonka Toy cattle truck, and we filled the slatted trailer with frogs. To what end? To that end. Sometimes, in the bar pits, especially if the water lingered for a week or more, there would suddenly appear an ephemeral shrimp, that looked for all the world, like a horseshoe crab. They and the frogs must have lain dormant for years, waiting for a one day gulley washer like this. I would see the same thing later in life in the dry Sahel of Senegal, when a good rain would reveal a seed bank and an insectary that could lie hidden for decades under blowing sand.

The winters could be snowy in Western Nebraska. It’s just that the snow came down sideways, always accompanied by a howling wind. First of all, we still had to do chores during those storms. Frozen jeans. But then the day would break with a blue sky and brilliant sun, and deep drifts around the farm stead, or flowing out downwind from the wind break. The gravel roads in such a place are built up, maybe 2-3’ above the ground, with soil taken from the bar pits. This was done to keep them dry during rainy stretches, but more importantly, to keep them wind swept of snow during blizzards. Generally, the drifts would not accumulate there, barring some obstruction or cut through a knoll, that allowed the snow to eddy and accumulate into a drift. Sledding would have been great if there had been any real nearby hills. Lacking those, dad would tie a rope to our Minneapolis Moline tricycle-wheeled tractor, and pull us on a sled around the farmstead. We dug snow caves and built forts for snow ball fights, of course. One particularly bad storm knocked out our electricity for 5 days, and mom moved all the frozen chickens, beef and vegetables from the freezer out into one of our play caves in the snow.

In spring, the locust tree in our front yard would erupt in a show of white blossoms. It was wedding time! My older sister and brother would get married and I and my little sister were ring bearers and flower throwers. In hindsight, that marriage never would have lasted, but showering the happy couple with white flowers was a lot of fun.

In summer, we would often rig an enormous tent with the tarp from the grain truck. We would run a rope between two of the trees down by the water tank, and just drape the tarp over it. It was thick and had its own peculiar tarp odor. It was so big and long, it provided a dark refuge, and we would nap or read books in it, or just pretend. We also had a cow tank for swimming. It was pretty large, maybe 12 or 15 feet across. We would roll it out under the trees by putting it on end and walking in it like gerbils. Then we would scrape it and use steel brushes to get all the dried moss out of it. Finally we would fill it from the water tank, and it became enough of an attraction that even the neighbor kids could convince their mothers to drive them over. The best game was to all crawl/swim in a circle till there was a strong whirlpool, and then reverse directions and try to move against it. Such fun! After about 2 weeks, it would be covered in moss again, (where do those spoors hide on the prairie?). Hot and rancid. We would empty it out, scrape and brush it and fill it back up.

Less that 5 miles north of us were “the breaks” cut by Pumpkin Creek, which were hard white clay and limestone escarpments, covered in soap weed (yucca), pear cactus and scraggly long-needled pines. This was a beautiful, and totally different landscape from the cultivated prairies. There, hills often terminated in abrupt cliffs. There, the cactus, yucca and rattlesnakes provided a welcome sense of danger you don’t get on the plains. There were small oil well pumpjacks, and occasional collecting tanks in parts of the breaks. The roads to them were not built up, rather just graded through the yucca and covered with loose gravel. In the winter, getting to them required a big enough truck to power through drifts. Glenn Twarling, the father of the closest neighborhood kids, had a part time job as an oil worker, checking and maintaining those oil wells. His truck could get in and out every day of the year, and he knew the roads well, so he was our ride into the breaks on a snow-covered day. Sometimes with 6 or more kids in the cab. I remember him stopping alongside a road cut that had numerous, large white fossilized turtles sticking out of the clay. I believe people let them be for many years, maybe taking one now and then for a doorstop, but then someone grabbed them all.

Our farmstead consisted of the house, a garage with an attached room for a hired man (called the bunk house), the chicken house, the brooder house, the cluck house, the out house, the milk barn, the little barn, the haymow, the hog house, the club house, the tractor shed, the shop, the granary and the big granary. We played in all of them. Hmmm. Club house you say? Yes, we kids had a club house. It was an abandoned granary that was attached to the tractor shed, the shop and another granary where the truck was parked. Since it was decrepit and no longer in use, we were allowed to do what we wanted with it. We made chairs out of tossed out chrome kitchen chair frames by lining the seats and back with rusted corrugated roofing tin. Those were, by far, the least comfortable chairs the world has ever seen. We held club meetings with the neighbor kids on those chairs. I recall we took dues and made at least one purchase: a small mail-order black and gold metal treasure chest filled with chocolate covered gold coins. The coins were divided equally, and the treasure chest held club treasures from then on. We hoisted a heavy wooden door up to the roof, and nailed it up sideways to serve as a fort. We fought with pop guns, feeble bows and arrows and dirt clods, some defending the clubhouse, others attacking. No one died. The cowboys/soldiers held the fort, which was the lame team. The indians got to circle, ambush, and climb trees to attack.

We spent a lot of time on roofs. I often shinnied up a power pole guy wire to get on the granary, but we were on all the other roofs too, save the house. There was a basket ball hoop on the concrete apron leading into that granary. We would play there, even on freezing nights, with a single yard light illuminating our frozen breath. That granary played a part in almost cutting this narrative short.

As kids, we often rode in the back of pickup trucks, or the larger grain truck. We had a 1958 Chevrolet, 8-ton truck, outfitted with an hydraulic hoist, which was used to haul anything, but mostly wheat. Once, when I was about 8 or 9, I was in the box, standing and looking out the back as my father drove into the granary. There was about 4-5” of clearance between the top of the truck and the jam of the large opening above the concrete apron. That jam caught the back of my head as dad drove in, and scizzor-like, pinched my neck between it and the top of the truck box. That pinch lifted my feet completely off the floor so that I barely squeezed through at the thinnest point of my neck. Close to decapitation. It scared the crap out of me, and as my dad parked the truck and shut down, he heard my screams. And it scared the crap out of him too. But, I lived.

We also had something called the junk pile. This was a long pit that might have been used for silage in the distant past, but now was a pit full of tin cans, an upside down model T, a large pile of limestone rocks collected as strays in the cultivated fields, old appliances and any other debris or junk from the farm that now, would all be sent to a land fill. The model T with its roof as a floor, and upside down gauges on the dash, became a submarine to us. The gauges became depth and radar. A rusted-out acetylene tank served as a torpedo. The seas were miles of waving wheat. The rock pile was turned into yet another fort, perfect for snow ball or dirt clod fights. The tin cans were always worth pawing through for some amusing discard, including cast-off toys that regained a nostalgic interest.

Our neighbors, the Twarlings, were also blessed with 4 kids, and we would spend time with them. Once, we came across the bleached bones of a dead cow, which we naturally assumed, were that of a dinosaur. We spent the afternoon dragging them up to their house, with plans to take them to our clubhouse when mom came to get us. It still seems perfectly reasonable to fill the car trunk with cow bones, but for some reason, mom balked. “Never underestimate the power of a small group of whiney children to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.” ~ with apologies to Margaret Mead. We got those bones home.

As we got older, we all began to work more and play less on the farm. But, we were allowed to use the arc welder, and learned how to attach bolts to shovels and horseshoes, or anything else that would weld. But the carefree days were coming to a close.

Part VII

Help

The farm always had a hired man in the summer when we were kids, as did many of the surrounding farms. These guys, generally bachelors, would migrate elsewhere during the winter. I recalled one, named Harlan, who liked kids and was a favorite. He had a cleft palate and understanding him was sometimes difficult. But he would make us badges by removing the cork liner from a 7-Up bottle cap with the pocket knife, that all men carried, and then show us how to sandwich our shirt between the cork and cap pressing the cork back in to make it stay put.

Hired men were white bachelors. Many of them had never had opportunities and it seemed this was their lot in life. Fifty miles north of us, in the river valley, the sugar beet crops were hoed by crews of Mexicans. There was not the dog-whistle view of these hard-working people that some of us have absorbed now for political reasons. Schools were integrated, but there was a distinctly dual social life within the schools, based on race. Occasionally a really good Mexican boy athlete or beautiful girl would become idolized enough to be a hometown hero. I believe humans are the only species capable of being so shallow.

We also had high school girls that worked during the summer, as baby sitters and help for mom. Generally they were from neighboring farms, but some came all the way from Potter. Mom had lots of work taking care of us; cooking, baking, butchering, gardening, canning, cleaning, washing clothes and ironing. The chickens were mom’s, though the cattle were dads, but both our parents needed help to get it all done. As we grew older, we kids replaced the outside help.

I recall one particular summer day, with Lorraine, our baby sitter. I must have been 3 and our parents were gone most of that day. They came home with a new, baby blue, 1954 Plymouth and a bushel of ripe peaches. Such a memorable day! I recall Lorraine walking me down to the hydrant near the windmill, and washing a peach for me. I recall that sweet juice running down my chest. I will interject here, that often, when given summertime fruit like watermelon or peaches, all my clothes were taken off, I was put outside, and I was left to enjoy myself.

Anyway, we weren’t subsistence farmers, but we were only a generation and a couple of bad farming years away from it, and yet there was enough to hire someone else who had even less. Something I wouldn’t see till later in life, in Africa.

By the time my cohort of boys had become teenagers, tractors and equipment had grown and could eat up the acres, and families could spare a son to work for the neighbor. That marked the end of the “hired man”, and my brother and I took over the bunkhouse each summer.

Part VIII

Dry Land Wheat Farming

A considerable part of my working life has been taken up in cultivation. Literal cultivation.

The High Plains are prairies, vast grasslands that roll on for hundreds of miles. Or, at least they used to be. A lot of the prairie soils are deep, built of millennia of decaying organic matter as prairie plants, with their deep roots, harvest the sun’s rays and minerals in the soil to create carbon material. As the plants senesce or die, that carbon becomes humous, which is readily available to further enhance plant growth. Those deep prairie plant mixes were zipped open with moldboard plows by the first settlers. Unlike many of the places in Europe and on the eastern seaboard, tree removal wasn’t an issue, and for that reason it perhaps seemed an easy place to homestead. The lack of native trees is probably due to a combination of periodic burning of the prairies due to late summer lightening, and the lack of rainfall. It is difficult for many trees to get a foothold. Cedars and pines in the breaks, and cottonwoods along streams or seeps have a chance in the right circumstance, but hardwoods, if they exist, are smaller compared to their eastern cousins, and found only along waterways.

When those prairies got plowed, the last crop of prairie plants fertilized a crop or two of corn, and then there was a reckoning, as yields declined or crops failed when rains weren’t timely. But some of those European immigrants to the plains were Mennonites, who brought winter wheat with them. From the Ukraine, hard red winter wheat fits. Planted in the fall, with a bit of moisture, the crop grows and stays green all through the winter, benefiting from deep snow, and unharmed by the cold. Come spring, and the plants boot (send up seed heads). There is a window of vulnerability then, when a severe frost can damage those heads, but in most years that doesn’t happen. The wheat grows tall, heads out and the bright green turns to a dark green, and eventually the brilliant golden wheat color as harvest approaches. The wheat harvest begins in Texas and moves northward through Oklahoma, Kansas, reaching Nebraska in June, and then continues on, up into Alberta.

My first paying job came when I was 8 years old. Cliff and Marie Parker were distant neighbors, but loved by everyone. I remember them as still having a first-generation accent of some sort. Cliff asked my parents if he could hire me to walk his wheat fields and pull errant rye plants out before they went to seed. Rye is a different color, a lovely blue green, and much taller than wheat. Its head is more thickly bearded and narrower than a head of wheat, so easily discernible, towering above the wheat crop. We walked a couple of mile-long fields together, zigzagging back and forth. Marie always packed us an enormous lunch, plus rich chocolate cake for a mid-morning break. He offered me heavily creamed coffee without a second thought.

As I grew older, and could be trusted on a tractor, I spent my Nebraska summers insuring that the bit of moisture needed for germination was available in September on the wheat ground. The system that evolved was called Summer Fallowing. Half of the land on a Nebraska wheat farm grew a crop each year, and the other laid fallow over the summer. Generally, that land started the year covered with the wheat stubble from last year’s crop. It was plowed down in early spring, as soon as the ground was no longer frozen, so perhaps March, but sometimes earlier. The winter landscape just prior to plowing, was a checkerboard of green wheat, looking lawn-like, and greying stubble that stood 10 inches tall. The plow turned that grey to black as it turned under the stubble.

Those beautiful clean beds were a vacuum, of course, an invitation to nature to be filled with all manner of weeds. If you farm or garden long enough, you realize that the whole world is covered with a seed bank of dormant weeds, and plants, waiting for an invitation. The job of a teenage boy on a Nebraska farm then, was to cultivate those fields, and keep killing those weeds, in order to preserve the soil moisture needed to germinate wheat in the fall.

After the spring plowing, the fields were lumpy with huge chunks of soil thrown over by the plow. The first couple of workings might be with a chisel plow, or disk, to break up and level those chunks into something easier to drive a tractor over. You might use a spring tooth to break up clods. Eventually, there was a smooth field with a layer of powdery soil on top, That soil preserved moisture underneath, but was also susceptible to wind erosion. Fallow tilled fields enabled the dustbowl, when drought, plus wind, plus clean tillage blew up huge clouds of dust that traveled even to the east coast. There was a mile-long line on a section we farmed, where the east side was a foot or more lower than the west side. Because one dry summer, the soil moved away from the fallow east side to Indiana. Many hilltops lost much of their soil cover, leaving rocks and poverty. I believe this has been addressed in the bible.

Maintaining that powdery level of soil on top was done with a rod weeder. My dad was the only farmer around who farmed with a caterpillar. He bought it when he had been invited by our relatives to return from California and farm. Caterpillars were exceptionally powerful with superior traction, so he could pull implements that were 30 feet wide, quite large for the era. This made up for their frustrating slowness, but it worked well. A rod weeder carries a thin, square rod, running just under the surface of the soil. It is linked to some traction wheels by a chain which turns the rod continually, and this has the effect of making the soil seem to flow like water over the length of the rod, uprooting any weeds and leaving them on the surface. It kills the weeds and leaves that powdery layer.

Starting when I was 13 or so, I would climb on that caterpillar each morning at dawn and ride till dark, perhaps stopping for a few minutes to eat a sandwich, refuel, or to pee. The can had no wheels, just tracks. In some fields I would cultivate over terraces, providing the one bit of fun, as the caterpillar would climb, its tracks eventually suspended out in space, and then flop down the other side.

The caterpillar had an electric starter, which was used to start a small gasoline engine. After the gasoline engine was running well, a clutch connecting it to the main diesel engine was flipped and the diesel engine would begin turning, driven by the gasoline engine. As that warmed up a bit, eventually you could open the diesel fuel line and the diesel would kick off in a cloud of smoke, while you disengaged the gasoline engine and shut it off. You had to leave the diesel to warm up some more, but from there out, nothing could kill it. That Cat could bury itself in mud without a hiccup and without ever dragging the engine down.

How do you steer a vehicle with no turning wheels? The Cat had a hand clutch on each side, and a brake on each side. The hand clutches were long levers, and they would disconnect the power from one track. Pulling both brought you to a stop. Generally you pulled one or the other back gently to keep the tractor moving in a straight line. In tight situations, you could also use the left or right side brake pedal, which could completely stop one side, leaving the opposite track to turn you in a planted circle with the braked side stationery. That couldn’t be done while pulling an implement because you could turn so tight you might bust up the hitch and climb right onto it.

So my day was spent pulling and braking with both hands and legs.

The Cat was without a cab, so you were perched on top of a powerful, noisy diesel engine for hours on end. When you climbed off at the end of the day, there was the silence of the prairie evening, and the ringing within your head which took several minutes to dissipate. The cat tracks and rod weeder sent up a voluminous cloud of dust, with me perched in the middle. I would climb down with 1/16th inch of dust covering every inch of me and my clothing and my hair. My eyeballs and the palms of my hands were the only flesh to be seen.

Sometimes, my dog Ginny would follow me out to the field. She would trot along at the far end of the rod weeder faithfully. Eventually she would flag, and I would stop, pick her up and hold her in my lap the rest of the day. We both came home covered in field.

Imagine then, a mile long field by a quarter mile wide. You varied the cultivation pattern each time you went over it, so sometimes in a square leaving little triangular corners that needed to be gone over at the end. Sometimes at a diagonal with turns and then a couple of laps around the outside to cover the missed spots from that. Always, you had to keep in mind that you were going to be judged, not necessarily by dad, but by neighbors. If you could drive straight, the evidence was there for all to see. If you overlapped too much from fear of missing a spot, that was obvious too. If you could not drive straight enough to keep from missing spots, then weeds grew up, to your eternal shame. If you missed enough weeds, you may even have to go out and weed by hand. And some farmer neighbor was sure to say something, either about your prowess, or your lack of it.

So hours and hours and hours of this, with nothing but your thoughts and the blank canvas of the field. Any anomaly in the soil was really evident. I would find a link from a chain, or a rusty pair of pliers dropped long ago. Even a nail. But once, I found an Indian maul, a large grooved granite river stone used for pounding pegs, that perhaps fell off a dog travois a hundred years ago, or a thousand, into the lush grass that once covered that place.

We farmed at our home place, about 480 acres, and we had another set of fields, about 160 acres, five miles away. The top speed on the caterpillar was about 5 miles an hour, so when moving to the distant field, you spent an hour running on the gravel road. This left behind the indentions of two parallel tracks in the road bed, which lasted for weeks or months until the township maintainer (road grader) came through and dressed the road.

Meanwhile, on the planted fields, the green wheat, standing 2 or more feet tall, began to turn color, eventually a beautiful gold. Farmers pulled their combines, (short for combine harvesters because they cut, and, threshed the grain), out of the quonset and started replacing worn out parts, changing belts, etc., in preparation for harvest. The goal was to get the ripe wheat out of the field and into the bin as quickly as possible with no fuss, so it made sense to make sure everything was in working order. Working on the combine with my dad was where I learned how to cuss. He was a mild mannered man, and hardly foul-mouthed, but if he was 10’ off the ground working on the top of the combine, and a nut would drop down into the concaves in the bowels of the machine where it would tear things up, well, he had a rote string of cuss words. I call upon that same string to this day when I hit my thumb with a hammer or something.

Things always broke down anyway, and mom would have to drop everything to drive to Sidney or Scottsbluff for parts at a moments notice. At risk was the bulk of the family’s income for the year, and nothing was more important.

As the wheat turned and became golden, farmers began checking the heads each day, to see how the kernels were filling, moving from a milky stage to a doughy stage, and gradually hardening. Moisture content needed to decrease to a certain level, or the wheat would require artificial drying. The Coop elevator would dock you, or not accept the wheat if the moisture content was too high. That was money out of pocket, and to be avoided unless necessitated by an incessant rainy spell. To check in the field, you would roll a head between your hands to see how it hulled. Then you would cup the loose grain in your hand and gently blow away the chaff. You would put the grain into your mouth and with experience, you could determine how it was coming along by how doughy or hard the grain felt between your teeth. When it was getting close, you might pull the combine into the field and cut a partial round to get a sample. Before the advent of readily available moisture testers, you would take a sample, run it the 15 miles to town and get a moisture content reading. If it was low enough, away you would go! And all the neighbors, if they saw you cutting, would drop by to hear the numbers and reckon about their own fields.

Harvest entailed rising at dawn to grease up and fuel the combine and trucks. Fuel was carried to the field in old, filthy 5 gallon metal containers, and would be poured into the tanks using funnels. We boys, when young, would be driving the trucks and eventually the combine as we got older. I began driving the truck, and a pickup with a mounted grain bin - in the field only - when I was 13. My older brother would drive the loads from the fields to the granaries and unload them. Dad rode the combine. My younger sister got that duty after the rest of us had grown up and left, liberation through necessity. Mom and the girls would cook enormous lunches of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, with home made lemonade. It would all be packed into the car trunk and brought to the field where everyone ate standing around to minimize the waste of time. There was always something festive about those urgent picnics, and the food was so good.

The worry was hail. The most beautiful crop in a family’s lifetime could be gone in 15 minutes, and it did happen many times. My parents grew wheat on that farm from 1948 until 1985. I remember dad saying there were two really good crops in all that time. The rest was just enough to keep doing it.

Sometimes hail could just kill you instead of just plant matter. Potter, Nebraska held the Guinness record for a long time as the hail capital of the world, having been the place on earth where the largest hailstone ever fell to earth. Once, when I was very young, dad was out on the caterpillar, miles from any structure or tree, when softball-sized hailstones started whizzing down out an angle and burying themselves into the cultivated earth. He shut down and crawled under the tractor, which was hit by a couple of stones, but that chunk of metal just shrugged them off.

Some farmers, especially the larger ones, used custom cutters. These were Texans and Okies and Kansans who had 2 or 3 or 5 large new combines, with trucks, camping trailers and pickups to match. They spent the summer following and harvesting the ripening wheat from Texas up into Canada. As they finished jobs, they would leapfrog ahead to towns farther north. Some had regular customers, and it would cause some angst if your custom cutter was delayed by weather to the south, when the wheat came on in the north. When the custom cutters started rolling in, Potter, and all the other little towns would be bustling with strangers, a lot of them young men looking for stuff that young men look for. Combines and trucks would be parked all along the streets, hoping to find a farmer in need. If there wasn’t anything available, off they would go farther north.

If all went well, the wheat was in a granary or the bin or the Coop elevator within a couple of weeks, and every one took a deep breath.

When cutting the wheat, the combine could leave a windrow of bright straw behind. Alternatively, the straw could be scattered with a large fan like spreader as it came out the back end. If left in windrows, the wheat straw needed to be bailed. This could be done immediately, or it could wait a month or two. But bailing was a three person job for us, as we tried to make stacks as we went. As my brother and I got older, this fell to us. Once we were big enough, dad would drive the tractor, pulling the bailer which scooped up and compressed the straw into 80 pound “small” square bails, while we boys would stack behind. Bailers were complicated machines with lots of moving parts. They compressed the straw or hay, and bound them with twine or bailing wire. Lots of things could go wrong - the twine break or ball up, the intake could get plugged. A neighbor of ours had tried to unplug a running bailer once, and it caught his arm and tore it off. As some kind of twisted revenge, he made his living from then on custom haying.

We drug a sled behind the bailer. When riding on it, you looked like you were gliding along behind the equipment as if pulled by a magnet. It was about 4 feet wide and 16 feet long, made of 2’ x 12’ boards You would pull the bales out of the baler and create a rectangular stack of straw 4 or 5 bales high, edged on the rear of the sled. There was a thin slot between the middle boards. Once your stack was complete, we pulled a heavy, pointed iron pole from the bailer. You would jab this into the ground in that slot and put your shoulder to it. The stack would come up against it, and stop while the sled, following the bailer, continued on. You would just walk this enormous stack right off the sled, pull out the rod, scamper back and start building the next stack.

Then, one fine fall Saturday, months later, after the high school football game the night before, the three of us would take the truck out to get the straw out of the field. We always drove our pickup out too, solely because it had a radio and we would park the pickup nearby with the doors open and listen to the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers kick the pants off some hapless opponent. And thus ended that year’s wheat crop.

In September, with the cooler weather, the next crop would be planted on that summer’s fallow field. If we were fortunate, there might be rain, but if not, the cultivation had preserved moisture. If it had been an exceptionally dry year, you might plant deeper to reach the moisture and insure germination. The fields would get a blush of green and then that hardy plant would set and crown, and the whole field would be covered in green, awaiting snow.

When I was 15, I began working for our neighbor, Merlin Maas. Merlin was a big friendly guy, and he trusted me with, what would now be, hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment. For the first time in my life though, I was in a tractor with a cab and air-conditioning. His wife Lois would fix me a lunch everyday that was fit for two people. Hours of sitting meant I always ate it, but I was a high school kid doing a lot of physical work elsewhere, and beefing up for football anyway.

I think I only once damaged equipment for Merlin, when I caught a rod-weeder on a power pole, and bent the rod. One other time, the engine blew up, but that was hardly my fault. A rod broke and fell into the piston cylinder, causing an enormous racket. I shut down immediately and left to find Merlin. He came and started it up to diagnose the problem, but shut down within a second also. This caused him to switch from Minneapolis Molines to John Deere. As Merlin’s farming grew, he acquired more land and more tractors, till now there is a line of beautiful, identical John Deeres lined up on his home place, which his son now farms. Merlin was a good guy, and he became a large farmer, de facto replacing a lot of smaller farmers, but that has been the way of the world throughout the midwest.

There is a coda here. Technologies have supplanted dry land wheat farming as I knew it. First, the Oglala Aquifer is now tapped and much of the land is now irrigated with pivots, which changes the types of crops that can be grown, while allowing a crop to be grown every year. Chemical fertilizers make the need for soil fertility less pressing, if not irrelevant. No-till chemicals and implements allow crop residue to remain on the surface without impeding the drills for planting, and weeds are controlled chemically rather than through cultivation. Satellite guidance assists chemical application, and in some cases guides tillage as tractors are approaching remote control. All of those technologies have replaced farmers. And now, the changing climate seems to be moving wheat country farther east and north.

But all those new technologies have limits or visible failures, at least visible to the perceptive.

Part IX

Vacation

Farmer families, especially ones with livestock, do not get a lot of vacations. After wheat harvest, but before fall planting and school started, we would sneak away, sometimes for as little as 3 or 4 days, leaving a neighbor kid to feed the animals. A few of those trips were into Wyoming. - the Snowy Range, and one time, Jackson Hole and Yellowstone. On those trips we carried our own white bread, bologna, mayonnaise and chips, so much of the dining was at roadside tables. We looked for motels with swimming pools for the night.

But generally we went to Denver and stayed in a motel, with a pool of course, on Colorado Boulevard. We always went to Cinerama, a special type of movie theater with a 150’ surround screen and overlapping projectors. I can recall seeing It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and How the West was Won on that screen. We got to eat at a cafeteria! Then we’d shop for school clothes, and head up into the mountains for a couple of days, generally at Estes Park. Sometimes we stayed in a motel, but other times we had a cabin. One time, we had just settled into the cabin when I developed a lump on my neck. Fearing I had mumps, and that we would be quarantined, my folks cut the vacation short, packed us all up, and drove directly to the hospital in Sidney. I was about 4 years old. The Doctor took one look, and declared it an abscess. Without further ado, he and a nurse held me down and he stuck a small stainless steel knife into me. Well, it squirted blood and puss all right, but they couldn’t hold me. This was on a second floor examining room, and I recall squirming away, running down the stairs, and out the door. I hid in the bushes surrounding the hospital, while my parents and nurses searched for me. Eventually I was corralled, but I wouldn’t let anyone clean me off. Everyone felt bad, and they asked if I would like an ice cream. I refused, saying I only wanted a beer. They took me for ice cream anyway, still covered in blood and puss. Eventually the blood dried and I was cleaned up that evening. My siblings remain resentful of the abbreviated vacation.

The vacation of most import was when I was 6 years old, in first grade. My parents had met in California, and both had relatives in Los Angeles. So one winter evening, we got up in the middle of the night, drove through the snow to Sidney, and waited shivering for the Union Pacific passenger train that came through in the wee hours. We boarded, too excited to sleep, and started on a two-day trip West. The train had a dining car, and observation cars with domed glass windows. We were allowed to go anywhere, and we took full advantage while mom and dad camped out protecting our seats and luggage. I recall going through the mountains and Utah, and eventually pulling into the Union Station in L.A. And in that vast space, as we wandered through our first glamorous, sun-filled California minutes, who should we see but Danny Thomas, a bonafide tv star!

We visited our cousins and my grandmother with her myna bird given to her by a sailor. It would make off-color comments to any pretty woman that walked by the window. We stayed with her and various aunts and uncles. We went to Disneyland and Marine World and saw the ocean. We ate avocados and coconuts and gaped at the big city. We did California. At one point, we were shopping in a multi-story department store in downtown L.A., and I escaped my parents for perhaps 15 minutes. This entailed some panic on their part I’m sure, but I was just enjoying the escalators.

One other vacation looms large, perhaps our final one as a family. My older sister and brother were nearing escape velocity, but we did take one final trip to the Four Corners region, staying in Durango, visiting Mesa Verde, and then heading to the tiny old mining and now tourist town of Silverton, deep in the mountains to the north. I recall going to a movie with my brother at a tiny art house cinema, only there because it was run by a guy who loved it. We kids could see freedom and adulthood, just around the corner.

Many years later, my girlfriend Wendy’s older sister, Valerie, would spend several summers in Silverton. Both Wendy and Valerie were talented singers. Valerie was several years older and she had a a summertime job as a singer/actor in the Melodrama theater there. She was with a group of her fellow players when their car left the road and plunged down into a canyon. She and four other young people died.

Our Family’s Politics

My parents were Democrats. Both came from modest means, my dad from farmers, my mom from the Depression South. Both were very liberal, manifested in their choice of politicians, but also in their feelings about race.

At the time, Nebraska had a mix of Democratic and Republican legislators, not always following the demographic lines you might expect. Our own legislator - Representative Terry Carpenter - was a well known, and well-off Democrat. We often had Democratic governors. But our Senators for many years were Roman Hruska and Carl Curtis. The columnist,Jack Anderson, who spent his days judging politicians and outing scandal, once described the pair as the worst, and second worst senators in the U.S. Senate. I believe Roman Hruska countered with the obliterating response, “…that mediocre people needed representation in the U.S. Congress, just as bright people did”. On the other hand, one of Carl’s later campaigns featured weepy brochures lamenting the death of his wife who had succumbed to cancer. He won the election and married someone else a couple of weeks later.

Weirdly, we received Ebony magazine through the mail. It was about, and for, black people, kind of the African American People magazine. I am sure that if anyone at their editorial offices bothered to check subscriptions, the dot at a rural address in the Nebraska Panhandle would have brought up some questions. It was my mom’s subscription, and she would read it cover to cover, as did we. We were curious. Together with our a set of The Book of Knowledge, and a large Encyclopedia, we all read continually in a world-broadening way.

There were plenty of racists around Western Nebraska, but very few non-white people. I remember mom hiding the magazine once because some old racist was dropping by, and she didn’t feel like dealing with him. But we sure talked about him when he was gone.

My parents did not countenance overt racial discrimination by white people, and this extended to the Mexican field workers around Scottsbluff, and to Native Americans. My parents admired the Mexicans for their hard work and strong families. My dad found native culture to be interesting and inspiring. They would not listen to racial epithets, and they avoided people whose self-worth depended on things like that. I bless them for instilling this in all four of their children.

My mom grew up in dirt poor Arkansas during the Depression. She said that then and there, the people were often all together in their poverty, black and white. She knew lots of black people growing up. She said that northern whites embraced black people as a race, but were frightened of them as individuals, because they had no black friends or acquaintances. The north to her seemed more segregated. She said southern whites and black people knew each other as individuals. Everybody knew and depended on someone across racial lines. They worked together and they treated the people they knew with respect. And counted on them. But the southern whites were taught to disparage the whole race as a people, and this came out violently when color lines were drawn.

She told a story about herself as a little girl, and a black woman who she saw every day, who lived and worked in the same neighborhood she did. My grandmother took in laundry and scratched for a living, as did everyone else. This woman cleaned a house nearby and on her way home would cut through the alley where my mother often played. They had come to know each other and were always pleasant and friendly to each other. One day, when my mother was maybe 8 years old, they ran into each other. My mom says she said something hateful, and the woman’s eyes went from smiling to tears as she walked on. I am sure it was probably the “n” word, and that someone had planted that in my mom’s young mind. But the hurt and pain she had so obviously caused shamed my mother in a life-changing way. It was so mindlessly cruel, done to someone she liked, and it shamed her to a point that it became one of the stories of her life. She’s not the hero of that story. But it was a pivot for her.

My parents liked FDR. They liked Truman. They liked Ike. They liked JFK. They were okay with LBJ. They didn’t like Tricky Dick. They were okay with Gerald Ford. They liked Jimmy. Living in Ronald Reagan’s America was like living in a fart cloud. Those choices all still make sense to me.

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Our family on the Great Plains was as ephemeral as those horse shoe shrimp. My parents landed in 1948 in Potter, farmed and raised children and became a part of the community. Their children were sent off elsewhere to get educated, and we never came back. Our family never owned a house.

Around 1983, my father asked if I wanted to come back and take over the farm. He was physically tired, in his early 70s, and knew he could not continue. I was 32 or so, and had been away from the farm since the summer of my first year in college, when I was 19. I had been to school in Lincoln and New York, lived in Colorado and Boston, and spent almost 8 years in Africa. I had seen gay Paree many times. I think he knew what my answer would be, but he asked just in case. The big break in their lives was a flat and stable launching pad for my life, and I am grateful.

They retired from farming in 1985 and moved to an assisted living facility in Gering, Nebraska. My sisters and I returned home to help with the farm auction. They sold everything, including their furniture. All the farming equipment, the tractors and trucks, all the bits and pieces, milking machines, veterinary syringes, grease cartridges, shovels and tools, the rusty nails, the welder, lumber, everything sold for $50,000 total. Someone bought the out house and the chicken house and moved them off on a trailer. A neighbor took over the fields. And the house and farmstead remained empty.

My father died 5 years later, and my mother lived and lingered on another 23 years after that. I remember closing their last bank account in Potter, and turning in the safety deposit box keys. Cashing in the Coop membership. The house and farm were abandoned and now are collapsing in ruins. Our family came into being, raised a replacement generation, and then disappeared from that place, between 1948 and 2013. We were a blink in the obscure story of Potter, Nebraska.

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This ends the part of my memoir of life on the farm. I continue to the next segment, entitled Getting Schooled, with tales from my 25 years of uninterrupted education.