Farm Girl

by Karen Jones Gowen

  “She dared to open doors and go through and do the things that stirred within her, do them by herself though she might be jeered for doing them, jeered, not cheered, for to many this seemed a waste of time. Her friends thought her a bit peculiar. But as Will Rogers said, ‘Why, friends, we are all peculiar, only in different ways.’ Yes, even the best of artistic people have been thought peculiar at one time or other. I can well remember when Robert Frost was thought very peculiar and his poems adversely criticized, especially his ‘The Death of the Hired Man.’ But he kept on writing what was in his heart and finally it crept into the hearts of others.

  “As Allen Tait, a fine poet and literary critic said, ‘Robert Frost helped us to see the old things in a new way, in a new light.’ This is what Julia Marker tried to do —just to see the old things, the common things in a new light, as she saw them in her heart.”

  This was what Jessie wrote about my mother, but it might just as easily have been written about her sister Willa Cather.

  Oil painting by Julia Marker

  Aunt Bernice in front of Aunt Elizabeth’s house

  Everett Junior High where Lucille attended ninth grade

  Chapter Ten:

  The Big City

  My dad wanted me to have a good education. It was always understood that I’d go to high school in Lincoln and stay with Aunt Elizabeth. Most of my classmates went to high school in Red Cloud and many of the girls worked for their room and board, cleaning house and babysitting.

  After Uncle Will died, Aunt Elizabeth didn’t have a lot of money, so she took in boarders. She rented out four rooms upstairs; she and Catherine stayed in the bedroom downstairs with a half bath. Dad paid her $25 a month for my room and board, and this way he could help out his sister while Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Bernice watched out for me.

  Aunt Elizabeth had a beautiful, red brick home. Uncle Will had been a carpenter and built this nice house. There were oak floors, a fireplace in the corner of the living room, an open, curved stairway in the front and also a back stairway.

  A reclining chair with oak arms and a little footrest sat in the living room. It had been Uncle Will’s favorite chair. I remember him, white-haired and jovial, sitting there with his cigar and talking about the club. He spent a lot of time downtown at the Elks Club.

  Aunt Elizabeth had a big dining room with a large round oak pedestal table. We’d sit around the table and eat dinner together. During the school year, Aunt Bernice, who taught third grade in Lincoln, always kept a room at Aunt Elizabeth’s, along with her friend, Miss James, also a teacher.

  Other boarders were a lady from Pennsylvania going to the University of Nebraska for her Ph.D in psychology, and a man who rode the trains while sorting the mail in the postal car. Then there was me, Aunt Elizabeth and Catherine.

  My aunt lit the hot water heater on Tuesdays and Saturdays for our baths. On those days, there would be hot water in the faucets. For a bath any other day, you had to put water in a teakettle on the stove and heat it up yourself.

  We each had our own big cloth napkin. We used it for a week, because Aunt Elizabeth only did laundry once a week on Mondays. Everyone put their own napkin ring or clip on their napkins and then placed it in a drawer of the large, oak buffet. I had a sterling silver clip with the letter “M” on it that Aunt Bernice gave me for Christmas. After dinner, I put that clip on my napkin and carefully laid it in the drawer until the next day’s dinner.

  Aunt Elizabeth was a wonderful cook. I especially liked her mashed potatoes on a platter, the potatoes formed into peaks around the edge of the platter, with creamed hamburger in the center. It looked like a mountain range with a lake of hamburger gravy.

  I admired the large platter of white Haviland china. I always wished I could have a set of Haviland china like that. It was made in France, a beautiful, translucent white, with scalloped edges and raised trim. If you held it up to the window, you could see light through it.

  She made a dessert called prune pie, with no top crust, that she served cold with whipped cream on the dainty dessert plates. She always served things very nicely with the Haviland china, the big cloth napkins, crystal glasses, and matching silverware.

  For breakfast, I liked her poached eggs. She had little metal pans that sat in a rack and she’d steam the eggs in those racks. Coming from the country where eggs were plentiful and common, I never liked eggs until then. At home we always had them fried or boiled, usually Mother fried them with ham or sausage. I had never eaten a poached egg until I lived at Aunt Elizabeth’s.

  She had a nice big yard and always raised a garden. Back between the garage and the fence line was a chicken house, with eight or ten hens to lay eggs for her cooking.

  The address was 1812 A Street, a brick street with street car tracks in the middle. About four every morning, you could hear the milk man driving his horse-drawn wagon.

  There was an 8' square little entry porch near the kitchen, and inside the door on the step is where the milk man left the milk. In real cold weather, the milk froze and pushed the cardboard top up. He left small pint bottles of cream and several quarts of milk. She served cream for the coffee and used whipped cream for her cooking. I drank that milk because it was bought milk and came in a bottle. At home I wouldn’t touch it unless it had chocolate in it.

  While living in Lincoln, I spent a lot of time with Catherine and felt even more like her sister. I was three years older than her, but we liked to do a lot of the same things, like roller skate up and down the Lincoln streets.

  One day we skated all the way down to the museum at the University of Nebraska, from A Street to R Street, about thirty blocks. Once there, we took off our skates and visited the museum. I remember seeing a mastodon dinosaur, put together from bones found when they built the high school in Campbell, Nebraska. Since Campbell was only twelve miles from our farm, I was especially interested in that display.

  Sometimes we went to the high school and heard a glee club sing in the afternoons. I especially liked the men’s glee club, hearing those rich, male voices and seeing them all dressed in their Sunday best, with suits and ties. They performed a lot of Stephen Foster’s music, like “My Old Kentucky Home.” They sang “Beautiful Dreamer” and such songs that were more traditional than popular.

  The Coca-Cola Bottling Company gave out coupons for every A you got in school. I always got a few A’s, so Catherine and I would take my coupons down to the bottling company to redeem for bottles of Coke. I hated the taste of it. I thought it tasted like medicine, but my cousin liked it so I’d give my coupons to her.

  One time she and I went downtown to a show on Saturday afternoon at the Stuart Theater, a real fancy theater that showed talkies. We saw Abbot and Costello. Before the movie two vaudeville men clowned around to entertain the audience.

  One of them said “I’m sorry I’m late, but my little Austin got stuck on a wad of gum.”

  On the street car home, we were laughing about the movie and having such a good time. Soon after arriving home we got a scolding for acting up in public. Miss James happened to be on that same street car and saw us giggling and talking about the show. She told Aunt Elizabeth that we were being noisy and unlady-like.

  Aunt Elizabeth scolded us and said we shouldn’t act like that in public, that “girls on a street car should be quiet and not act like they’re the only ones there.”

  My two aunts watched out for me the four years I lived in Lincoln. Aunt Bernice especially was awfully good to me. She let me take her car to go places, and she encouraged me to have social experiences, to go see and do things in the city with other young people.

  Once I was invited to a party where you were supposed to bring a boyfriend.

  I said, “I can’t go, I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  Catherine said, “I have a boyfriend, can I go to the party?”

  But of course she couldn’t. She wasn’t invited and she was only twelve. Aunt Bernice told me to go anyway, she really wanted me to go, and she
drove me even though I didn’t want to.

  I had a terrible time because everyone had a boyfriend but me. They played Spin the Bottle, and there I was with no boyfriend. I didn’t want to play the game or be at the party, so I called to come home early.

  The kinds of parties I liked were the church parties at Epworth League both in Lincoln and at home. We’d play Old Man Tucker, Skip to my Lou, games like that. We called them folk games. There were lots of Methodist churches in Lincoln, and one time there was a big get-together with all the Methodist youth in the Epworth Leagues, about sixty or seventy young people. We played folk games, sang and had refreshments—sandwiches, cake, lemonade or cocoa if it was wintertime.

  Aunt Bernice had a friend named Hazel Smith who stayed at the house in the summers. Her husband was part American Indian, named White Cloud Smith, but everyone called him Cloud. He went around to schools and told dramatized stories about historical figures like Davy Crockett or past U.S. presidents. He also worked as a guide down at the State Capitol Building and showed visitors around, a very handsome man, quite tall with black hair that later went snow white.

  Cloud Smith liked the outdoors. When they were at Aunt Elizabeth’s, he often went down to Antelope Park and cooked his supper down there, just to be outside.

  His wife was his agent and she’d call around to schools and places to get him booked to do his dramatizations. He wrote his own programs and was very good. Hazel and Cloud went all over the country doing these programs about historical characters so school children could learn about history. They would come back in the summer when schools were out and that’s when he wrote more programs for the fall.

  They had their car rigged up so the front seats could go down for sleeping. They always dressed very nicely, but they slept in their car when they traveled.

  One time they were giving programs in New York City, and they went into the Waldorf Astoria Hotel like they were paying guests. They sat in the lobby, ate in the restaurant, used the restrooms, and then at night they went out to their car in the parking lot and slept the night.

  My experience going to school in Lincoln and living in the big city taught me a lot. I had always been a kind of shy, quiet country girl who went to school and church, and that was about it. Living at Aunt Elizabeth’s opened my eyes to a more sophisticated way of living. Getting acquainted with her boarders introduced me to many different people and ways of life, and having to go to this big high school from my little country school helped me to overcome my shyness.

  It is because of my aunts that I learned to speak in front of an audience. When I first started high school, I panicked if I had to stand up and give an oral report. My knees and hands shook the paper and my voice quivered. I changed classes if I found out I’d have to give an oral report.

  My aunts wanted Catherine and me to take dramatic lessons from Mrs. Ada Malcolm. Every Saturday morning, we walked the seven blocks to Mrs. Malcolm’s house. She gave us students, seven or eight in the class, a poem or story to learn and recite in front of the group. The following week, she suggested how to make the characters and dialogue more real and how to speak more clearly. One piece I learned was “Li’l Brown Baby,” by Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

  After mastering a recitation, Mrs. Malcolm would have two or three of us go and present at a women’s club or some group requesting one of her programs. The first couple of times were agonizing for me, but eventually I began to get compliments and my fear and shyness lessened.

  I wanted to be a teacher like Aunt Bernice, so after high school I enrolled in Kearney State Teacher’s College to get my teaching certificate. I taught country school during the Depression, and then went back to Lincoln to attend the University of Nebraska. I graduated from the University in 1940, and that summer traveled to different areas of the country with girlfriends.

  I taught Junior High for two years in Scotts Bluff before deciding to pursue a Masters degree in speech at Northwestern University in Chicago. At Northwestern I met Bill Jones, a divinity student at the university. We married in 1944 and lived in central Illinois where he served as a Methodist minister.

  We were blessed with four very smart daughters, so my dad got his wish to have “four more just like you.”

  High School Graduation, 1934

  At home on the farm

  Chapter Eleven:

  The Stock Market Crash

  I was in Lincoln starting high school in 1929 when the stock market crashed. I didn’t even know what the stock market was. I heard that there were businessmen who lost so much money in the stock market that they were jumping out of windows, in places like New York and Chicago.

  When an Extra was put out by the newspaper, the newsboys out on the street called, “Extra, extra, read all about it!”

  And people came out of their houses to buy a paper and “read all about it.”

  That’s how we got the news of the stock market crashing. It didn’t change anything in my life. I still went to school every day and ate dinner every evening in Aunt Elizabeth’s dining room.

  With all the talk about investors losing everything after the stock market crash, I got to thinking about Deveraux Anderson and his young wife.

  One summer when I was about ten, Catherine and I were playing outside in my yard, and a big black Cadillac drove into the farm yard. There were four strange people in the car. Who were these people visiting us in a Cadillac? Two very excited little girls ran into the house to tell my mother.

  The strange people were from Florida and claimed to be relatives of my dad. They had stopped at Ray Wilson’s, who had sent them on to our place. When my dad came in, they explained how they were related, and he was very friendly to them, inviting them to dinner.

  Since Mother didn’t have anything ready, they said they would go to town and bring something back for the meal. They invited me to ride along, and I sat on a little fold-down seat right in front of the back seat of their big Cadillac.

  The visitor’s names were Deveraux Anderson and his wife, who owned the car, and Clifton and Minnie Brill. Deveraux and Clifton were cousins and second cousins to my dad. Deveraux and his wife were very lovey-dovey. Sitting in the living room visiting with my parents, she sat on his lap and rubbed his face, acting silly with him and talking babyish. I was fascinated with her because I’d never seen anyone like her, dressed so stylish yet acting so silly. No grownups I knew ever talked or acted like that, not even newlyweds.

  On the way to Inavale, Deveraux’s wife got very excited and said, “Look, look! There’s an eagle! Stop the car Honeybun, I want you to see the big eagle.”

  He stopped and she pointed to a big bird landing on a telephone pole.

  I said, “That’s a hawk. We see lots of those around here. They eat the mice in the fields.”

  When we got to Inavale, they took me into the drug store and gave me two dollars to buy candy! Never in my life had I been able to buy so much candy. I picked out several kinds, some that I liked and some that I knew Catherine liked, and went home with two big bags of yummy candy. I couldn’t wait to show Catherine.

  The two couples stayed with us a few days. Our round oak dining table was extended with leaves and the white tablecloth stayed on. Meal time was a fascinating event, watching these people who were so different from anyone I’d seen before. Deveraux was a promoter and investor and talked endlessly about the opportunities in Florida to get rich. He wanted my father to give him money to invest. Dad wasn’t much interested in that kind of investing. However, Dad did give him $100 when they left, since Deveraux was family and since Dad was afraid they might not make it back to Florida the way he was throwing money around.

  In 1929, Deveraux lost everything, and of course he never paid my dad back the $100. We never heard from him again. Minnie and Clifton Brill were more stable, common people and we heard from them often over the years.

  When the stock market crashed, I thought about Deveraux and his silly young wife and their big Cadillac, and wondered what beca
me of them.

  Back home though, around ‘31 or ‘32, my dad didn’t get hardly anything for his crops. Corn was selling for five cents a bushel, and he said, “Well, I’m not going to sell my corn for five cents a bushel.”

  So that year he didn’t buy coal like he always did. He just burned the whole cobs of corn in the cookstove and the furnace. He dried them and then burned the cobs, corn and all.

  Dad and Uncle Ford used to drive fifteen head or more of cattle down to Inavale eight miles down the road, both men on horseback driving the herd. Close to the railroad tracks and the Inavale depot was a penned off area for the cattle coming in. When the train came in, the men would get the cattle one at a time up a chute into the cattle car. The chute had fences on both sides to keep the cattle in line. Then my dad would ride on the train with the cattle down to market in St. Louis or Kansas City.

  One time in 1927 or ‘28, before the stock market crash, he was so proud because he had topped the market in Kansas City. His cattle had brought $14.98 for 100 lbs., the highest price paid for cattle at that market. Then a few years later, around 1933, cattle were selling for $3.00 for 100 lbs.

  Still, my dad had plenty of money, but he wasn’t spending it. He didn’t want to keep it in the bank after a lot of them closed, so he invested it in different places like bonds or mortgages.