We moved back to
the country when the Big Depression hit at the close of the Twenties. Dad got laid off at the Fisher Body plant and
could not find another job in Kansas City so he headed back to the hills to try
farming again. With no money to invest
in land and equipment, the best my father could do at the time was to go to
work for someone else as a tenant farmer.
It was back to the outhouse, the kerosene lamps, and splitting and
carrying wood for the stoves—not to speak of baths in that washtub by the
cookstove.
We lived on about
five different farms between 1930 and ‘33 or ‘34. One, I believe the first after Kansas City,
was a small farm a couple miles out of Greenfield, that belonged to a man named
Earl Wilson. I remember Wilson lived in a
big yellow house right on the edge of Greenfield. From the three-room little farm house where
we lived, us kids walked down a dirt road quite a way to another one-room
country schoolhouse. It needed paint so
bad that it was just a weathered grey sitting under spreading oak trees.
One reason I
remember that dirt road is that at the foot of the hill from our house a branch
(a stream too small to call a creek) ran under the road through a culvert. Just below the culvert there was a pool where
Richard and I taught ourselves to swim.
At least we dogpaddled around in it.
The pool in that branch seemed like a pretty good swimming hole to us
little boys, but I was back there fifty years later [I was with him] and went by to look at it. The branch must have shrunk or something
because that “swimming hole” seemed hardly big enough to water a couple of
cows!
We did not stay
long at the Earl Wilson place. I am sure
that my father was not at all happy working as a hired hand. He found a fair-sized farm a few miles north
of Bona near Fair Play, Missouri. It
belonged to a doctor named Hunt so we always called it “the Doc Hunt place.” It had a small weathered farmhouse,
smokehouse, well with a cast-iron pump in the yard, chicken house, and
outhouse. The grey weathered sprawling
barn was pretty old, but my father made it do for the mismatched team of myules
he got and for several milk cows.
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| Doc Hunt place circa 1952 |
While we lived on
the Doc Hunt place I was about nine and Richard was eleven so we could start
helping out around the place with chores. We fed the chickens, split and carried wood,
and sometimes helped with the milking. I
do not recall ever having been taught to milk a cow. It seems like farm kids just know how to do
things like that can be a mystery to city kids.
I guess we were getting practical lessons from Dad every day without
ever realizing it. We had a good tutor,
too—Dad was a hard worker and he knew everything that needed doing around a
farm.
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| Doc Hunt place circa 1952 |
One time it was a
good thing that Richard and I knew how to milk.
Dad and Mother had taken Rex and gone in our old Model T to Bona, Greenfield,
Bolivar, or somewhere. They were not yet
back when we got home from school—another one-room country school, Shady Grove,
that we walked a mile and a half to get to. We knew exactly what to do about
the evening chores so pretty soon we had everything done except the milking. The problem with that was that Dad had been
selling milk and we had about twenty cows that were demanding to be milked as
the sun went down. That is one whale of
a lot of teats (eighty to be exact) to squeeze by hand!
When the sun was
nearing the horizon, Richard and I knew those cows had to be milked so we got
the buckets and a milk can and started.
When it got dark, we lit a kerosene lantern and kept at it. Our small hand and arms got dog tired, but we
stayed with it and were just finishing stripping the last two cows when the
Model T finally pulled in. I think they
maybe had a flat tire or something that had delayed them in town.
Dad, who had been
figuring that he would have to malk all those cows in the dark, was real proud
of us for getting everything done and he said so. That made us proud, too, but it was sort of
embarrassing because usually he did not say much when were were right, but boy
he sure let us know when we did wrong! I
guess that is how us boys grew up with the philosophy that a fellow does not
need a bunch of praise for just doing what he is supposed to do. Praise only came when you did something
really outstanding—like two little boys getting all those cows milked.
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| Fair Play Store as it might have looked during the '20s & '30s |
