A Great Life – Unplugged

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When my brother Ralph and I grew old enough, we helped our father and older brother Bob hoe all kinds of vegetables. It was a real treat for the two of us, when we reached our early teens, to be allowed to cultivate with our horse, Dolly. I generally rode Dolly after we harnessed her to the row cultivator while Ralph walked behind to keep the cultivator even to the row. We used horses to mow hay, work with the hay loader, rake the hay, plant corn, and do many other jobs. We left them unshod because the fields and roads consisted of soft sand.

My father had an old iron-wheel tractor – a 10-20 International. He sometimes plowed with it but used it mostly in the woods where he cut logs every year to pay for the land taxes. In 1948, we purchased our first new tractor – a small one that cost $650. It had a mowing machine, cultivator and a plow. In 1950, we purchased another new tractor – a C Farmall that cost $1,200. That was the beginning of the end of using horses and the iron-wheel tractor. My father gave the horses to a neighbor and traded the old tractor off for a hay loader. By 1953, most of the workhorses and iron-wheel tractors were gone in the area where I lived.

But the cows lived on! There was always and forever the relentless, inevitable, twice-a-day chore – milking. We milked the cows by hand for what seemed like ages until, in 1951, we purchased a Surge milking machine. That made milking cows a lot easier even though the machine meant additional equipment to wash and sterilize. I could not foresee then that when I grew to adulthood I would own a much larger dairy farm near Whitehall, New York, where, shortly, bulk milk tanks would replace the old milk cans, large tractors with cabs would become standard, and the barns would grow in size to accommodate ever larger herds of cows. Pipelines, milking parlors, feeding lots and silo hay storage also became dairy essentials.

Even with all the work we did, we had time for play. Sledding, snowballing, wading in streams, playing Indian and cowboy, organizing impromptu ball games and building tree huts in the woods. On weekend evenings, we popped corn, ate homemade fudge, played board games, and read or listened to Popeye, Superman and The Lone Ranger on the radio. When one of my sisters learned to drive, she took Ralph and me to the movies almost every Saturday evening. Movie tickets cost 10 cents!

After our one-room school closed for the summer, one of our most appreciated pastimes was going for a swim in Big Creek just over a mile away. Local children, when old enough, experienced a proud moment and a real thrill when they took their first plunge from the road overpass to the swimming hole many feet below. No adults supervised the swimming hole or the playground in those days but there were always older girls who acted as guardians of the young, both at school and at the swimming hole.

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