About Dad

Dad grew up in a large, poor farm family.  He was the youngest of nine children.  As soon as the children were old enough, they worked, and my grandparents worked right along side them.  The boys fed the hogs and milked the cows.  They plowed the fields behind a team of horses.  They cut hay by hand and loaded it onto hay wagons with pitchforks and stored it in the barn.  In the winter they cut and split firewood to heat their house.  They cut blocks of ice from the lake, hauled it home on sleds pulled by horses and covered it with straw in the root cellar that was dug into a hill near the house, so they would have ice for the ice box to keep their food cool year round.  They couldn't go to the corner grocery and buy ice then, for there was no store within 10 miles, and no ice and no money even if there had been ice.  They had no refrigerator as that was a luxury.  Whatever they needed, they pretty much had to figure out a way to do it or get it themselves.

When the girls were old enough, they took care of the younger children.  Their mother worked hard every day just to keep food on the table and keep her family clothed.  She washed clothes in a washtub, rubbing the dirt from them on a washboard.  She ironed the clothes with a flatiron that she heated on her wood burning kitchen stove.  I can't even imagine how many loaves of bread she had to make each week for a family of eleven people, and sometimes twelve, when my great-grandfather or one of her brothers was staying with them, as they did frequently.  The girls worked in the garden.  They picked wild raspberries and blueberries in the summer, along with whatever other wild fruits could be found.  They helped with the cooking and the cleaning and the canning of vegetables from the garden and the preserving of fruit and the making of jam and jelly and pickles.  They churned cream to make butter and gathered eggs from the chickens.  My Dad's oldest sister once remarked that she didn't have a childhood, because she was taking care of her baby brothers and sisters while she was growing up.  That was no easy task in itself, for there were two sets of twins in that family.

When the boys were young men, it was in the middle of the Depression.  Money was scarce.  So some of them headed west to the Dakotas and Montana to work.  Dad and his brother Kenneth got jobs picking potatoes in Montana.  Dad told me that there was a machine that was pulled by a team of horses or mules.  That machine dug the potatoes out of the ground and deposited them on the surface.  He and Kenneth went behind, bent over and picked up the potatoes and tossed them into a large wagon.  It was a backbreaking job, but it provided money for the family.  Dad and some of his brothers rode a train to the Dakotas to work on wheat thrashing crews.  Riding in a passenger car was out of the question as there was no money for tickets, so they rode in empty boxcars.  There were huge machines that did the same job that a combine does today, but there was a lot more physical work involved.

In the winter the boys would work in the woods.  They felled trees and loaded them on horse drawn wagons or sleds to be taken to the sawmill where they were cut into lumber.  Dad was working in one of these lumberjack camps when he hurt one of his arms.  The boss was going to send him home, but Dad convinced him that he could cook, so they kept him on.  He said that he had to learn how to cook in a real big hurry, as a room full of hungry lumberjacks could get mean really fast!  He must have figured it out because he was one of the best cooks I knew, next to Mother.

Three of the girls became teachers to earn money for the family.  At that time a college education wasn't necessary.  All they needed was a teaching certificate.  Each of them taught in country schools until they married.

Even though all of Dad's family worked hard, they still had time for fun.  In the summer they would go swimming in Twin lake close to their home.  There was a small river that ran about a mile from the house, and they would go fishing.  They would go to barn dances and house parties.  My grandfather had a good singing voice and he could play the piano, so he entertained his family in that way from time to time.  In the winter they would go sledding on the hill in the pasture across the driveway from the house.  They visited relatives and relatives came to visit them.  There was no television and I think it was after most of the kids had left home before they had a radio.

My Dad and all of his siblings had wonderful senses of humor.  Dad has told lots of stories about the pranks they would play, and I will tell you about those later.

My Dad had a work ethic second to none.  He worked in a filling station in Blackduck after he married Mom.  He drove a gas truck, delivering gas or fuel oil to farms in the area.  He drove a school bus for a time.  He and Mom moved to St. Paul and stayed with my Grandma Paul when it became clear that Dad just couldn't make a living in the North.  He worked for a time in a factory that made refrigerators and then found the job as a grain sampler in Willmar, where he worked until he retired.  Even when he took on extra work in order to take care of Mom when she needed so much medical care, I never once heard him complain.

There was a day that Dad came to see me while I still lived on the Eddy farm.  I was hot and sweaty and dirty from working cleaning the hog barn.  And I was roundly complaining about being so dirty.  He just looked at me and said, "There is no shame in being dirty from hard work.  The only shame is for being dirty from laziness."  Another time when I had a job that I really disliked, he told me that even if I was digging a ditch, I should dig the best ditch that I possibly could.  And that I should not do it to please a boss, but I should do it for the satisfaction of a job well done.

I think that pretty much sums up my Dad.