Farm Girl

by Karen Jones Gowen

  One time he held a mortgage on someone who didn’t pay. He’d have me write to them and pretty soon we’d hear back that they were trying, they’d pay as soon as they could. After a period of time, they’d pay. When I was twelve, I had received a bookkeeping set so I could keep track of his accounts and his investments. That really surprised me, because I didn’t get birthday presents, or even much for Christmas.

  Once when I was seven, I read somewhere, probably in a book at school, about a birthday party where you invited friends and celebrated your birthday. I told Mother that I wanted a birthday party, and she hinted that I might get one. So that year on my birthday, I looked and looked for people to come down our lane, but nobody came. She hadn’t invited anyone.

  That wasn’t mean on her part, because no one we knew ever had birthday parties. The only time I’d heard of them was in books. No one really celebrated birthdays out in our community even before the stock market crashed, you were just a year older. The Depression didn’t make any difference with birthdays, or with Christmas either, because children never expected much at those times. Back then children weren’t showered with gifts, not even at Christmas. I always got a book from Aunt Bernice and as long as there was Santa Claus, I’d get something from my parents.

  One time around Christmas, we were in town and I saw this nice, big beautiful doll that had curly brown hair, a beautiful complexion, and eyes that blinked. She was about two feet tall, and you could move her arms and legs. Oh, how I wanted that doll!

  Mother bit her lip and said, “Oh dear, Lucille, look how expensive it is. I don’t think you can have that.”

  Dad laughed and said, “That’s not for you, Lucille, it’s not worth it.”

  A few weeks later I was playing in the bedroom next to the kitchen and saw a box under the bed. There was that doll! I didn’t say anything, just pushed the box back under the bed.

  I got that from Santa Claus on Christmas Day, and that was probably the biggest present I ever received from Santa or anyone.

  One Christmas Eve, Dad came in from doing the chores kind of late.

  He said, “Better get to bed, I hear some noises out there.”

  I hung my stocking on the cupboard. Our tree was a few branches from one of our pine trees, stuck in a can of sand. You couldn’t go out and cut trees, this was Nebraska farm land, and trees were scarce. And you wouldn’t think of buying one.

  We’d always celebrate Christmas with the Lutz’s, Aunt Dora, Uncle John and their kids. One Christmas Eve they arrived in their car, and it was kind of snowing. We could see Ford and Bernice coming over the hill in their horsedrawn wagon.

  Aunt Dora teased them, “All you had was a mile to go, and you had to take the wagon!” Back then, people drove their cars in good weather, but in rain or snow they felt more secure with the horse and wagon.

  I’d get a present from the Lutz’s, a present from Ford and Bernice, and one from Santa Claus. In my stocking, I’d get candy, an orange, pencils, a necklace or bracelet. One year when Christmas was at the Lutz’s, my dad gave me a leather case with a manicure set containing a file, scissors, and a cuticle pusher. I used that for years and years; it was a very useful present.

  I always looked forward to getting a book from Aunt Bernice, usually the Bobbsey Twins. I loved to read and always wanted more books to read. I couldn’t get books at the Red Cloud library because you could only keep them two weeks, and we weren’t sure of getting to town in two weeks. It was a nickel a day if you were overdue. We’d go to Inavale to trade eggs every week, but there was no library there. Just a post office, a bank, a lumberyard, a drug store and the Schneider and Waldo’s stores.

  While Aunt Bernice was home from Lincoln for her Christmas vacation, Dad and I would go over there and visit in the evenings. Mother didn’t go, she preferred to stay home and work on one of her projects.

  Dad, Bernice and Ford would talk for hours. Once I was telling Aunt Bernice about our school play, and I gave my part in the recitation as well as everyone else’s. I had them all memorized, and she was so tickled by that.

  Ford’s house was heated by a round hard coal burner with lots of chrome that sat in the middle of the dining room. It had a point on top, glass doors where you could see the red fire, a chrome rack around it so you could sit close to it and put your feet on the rack. I’d sit on the little footstool next to the stove, listening to their conversation, enthralled by Aunt Bernice’s stories. And we’d eat candy.

  Aunt Bernice always brought lots of candy home at Christmas, chocolate-covered cherries, ribbon-like hard candy, and raspberry candy with soft centers. She would tell us stories about teaching third grade. When it was time for recess, she had her students turn, rise and pass before they went out to play. She would say “turn,” and they’d turn in their seats, then “rise,” and they’d get up from their seats, and then “pass,” and they filed out for recess. Her biggest discipline problems were kids shooting paper wads in class.

  One of her students she called “Hoodabooboo,” because that was his favorite word. He was mentally deficient and always said “hoodabooboo” about everything. She was trying to teach him something and trying to help him along.

  I remember her talking about one little boy who was her favorite. She thought he was such a nice little boy. She told us how well-mannered and polite he was, and such a good student. Then it turned out that this little boy grew up and went to prison. He robbed a bank in southwestern Nebraska and killed seven people. Aunt Bernice could hardly believe it possible, because in third grade he had been the nicest boy. I remember when that happened, reading in the paper about him.

  The paper quoted him, “I wish someone had stopped me, I was afraid I was going to kill people.”

  He said he had tried to get help but no one would listen. I had read in the Bible about demons in people, and it sounded to me like he had a demon. So I thought, maybe there is something to this idea about demons in people. It would explain a lot, especially in a situation like that.

  I felt very fortunate in the kind of wholesome life I’d had growing up. Besides our nice farm, we had a network of friends, neighbors and relatives both in the New Virginia and Norwegian communities. I never felt affected much by the stock market crash or the Great Depression, because not that much changed for me. I came home summers and holidays; my life went on as usual.

  The hardest part was seeing the hardship on the farmers and their families in our community. First it was the Depression, then the dust storms began, and then it was a long drought when no crops would grow.

  The Nebraska farm girl home for the summer

  Farm girl by the car

  Catherine May

  Chapter Twelve:

  A Sad Tale

  Catherine had always been strong-willed, but then something happened that made things worse. She was about thirteen and was playing across the street with a girl her age named Ruthie. I was sitting in the big chair in Aunt Elizabeth’s living room, studying and doing homework.

  Catherine came through the front door, slamming it shut. She stomped into the living room, saying, “Ruthie said I’m adopted! I’m not adopted!”

  I just looked at her, not knowing what to say. Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Will weren’t able to have children, and they had adopted Catherine when she was nine months old. All the Markers knew, but apparently no one had told her. We never thought anything about it, she was just part of the large Marker family like I was and like all the other cousins.

  Aunt Elizabeth took her into the bedroom and had a talk with her. After awhile, Catherine stormed out of the bedroom, her brown eyes flashing, and her cheeks red.

  She said, “She’s not my real mother, so I don’t have to do what she says!”

  From then on, Catherine was a problem. She became rebellious and disobedient, even more than before.

  Then when she was sixteen, her mother died. Aunt Elizabeth was sixty-six and sitting in her chair on a summer day when she suffered a quick heart attack.
Hazel Smith was staying there at the time and called Aunt Bernice out at Uncle Ford’s. I was nineteen and hired to teach school that fall, so I wouldn’t be in Lincoln to help with Catherine. She became Aunt Bernice’s responsibility.

  After that, Catherine became a bigger problem. It was up to Aunt Bernice to take care of her, and poor Bernice wasn’t equipped for it. After all, she had never married or had any children.

  We went up for the funeral and Catherine came home with Aunt Bernice and stayed out in the country with us the rest of the summer.

  When they returned to Lincoln in the fall, the two of them lived in the house with a few boarders. Not as many as before, because Aunt Bernice taught school and couldn’t do all the cooking and laundry for a lot of boarders. Besides, she had her own money and didn’t need to keep boarders for a living like her sister had done.

  I was teaching country school by then and Aunt Bernice said, “Oh, Lucille, I wish you were going to be here to help with Catherine.”

  Two years later, I moved back to Lincoln to attend the University of Nebraska. Catherine went out with a lot of guys and a few girls, and they’d drive around and go to bars. I went along a few times to be with her, to try and watch out for her, but by then she was set in her ways. I didn’t like going with them. They were wild and here I was, a non-drinker, because that’s how my family was and because I’d signed a pledge at the New Virginia church when I was twelve.

  Catherine started at the University of Nebraska, and we all hoped she would get busy with her studies and settle down, but she didn’t go to class very often. She liked a guy named Elwin who was twenty-seven, ten years older than her. When she turned eighteen, she married him. He was an established carpenter who had money, and she started wearing fancy clothes, buying herself a raccoon coat.

  In the early part of the War, there was an air base in Lincoln, and she got to running around with one of the guys there. She got pregnant by him and divorced Elwin to marry the other. He was from Oregon, and when he went overseas, she went to Oregon to live with his folks.

  Through the years, we would hear from Catherine now and then. Not very often. She corresponded most often with Hazel Smith. As time went on, her letters to me and Aunt Bernice came less and less frequently, but Hazel would keep us informed.

  Catherine had three boys from this marriage, but eventually they divorced. She had a lot of problems with her boys.

  One summer she came out to Nebraska to see Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ford. She wanted them to take on the oldest boy and take care of him, because he was her biggest problem. They said no, and that made her mad. After that, she didn’t want anything to do with any of the Markers. She stopped writing to us altogether, and for awhile we only heard about her through Hazel Smith.

  She worked as a waitress in Oregon, trying to support herself and her boys. This oldest son eventually got into bad trouble and went to prison. My heart was breaking for Catherine. It didn’t matter to me that she was adopted, she was still my family.

  I wrote to her and told her how I had enjoyed growing up with her, that she was like a sister to me. I wrote that she had always been such an important part of my life and recalled what fun we always had together. How I treasured those memories! I never heard back from her. She was mad at Aunt Bernice and probably mad at me, too.

  When Aunt Bernice died in 1970, she left Catherine $1000. I found her address and wrote again, telling her to contact this particular lawyer, that Aunt Bernice had died. I don’t know if she ever did or not. My cousin Cecil Johnson and I each got $25,000 from our aunt, and I felt kind of bad about that. But it was how Catherine had acted.

  I never heard from her or learned anything more about her or her boys.

  Young Lucille and Catherine in a buggy

  John Marker

  Chapter Thirteen:

  Dustbowl Days

  For us, the Dust Bowl started in 1934. We didn’t have any rain that summer, the corn grew up about twelve inches high, then turned brown and fell over. There wasn’t enough moisture in the soil to hold it up. It was growing in dust, so it just fell over. There was no snow that winter, or if there was it was very little, didn’t amount to anything and blew off the fields.

  In March of 1935, I was at Kearney State Teachers College going to school for my rural teaching certificate. Mother and Dad drove up one weekend to bring me home. A girlfriend came, too. Her dad was going to come out from Red Cloud the next day to pick her up at our place.

  We approached the house and saw a huge black cloud. My dad hurried and did the chores before the storm came. It was evening, but things were darker than usual because of these clouds and dust blowing everywhere. Mother quickly went in and turned the house lights on, and the yard light on the windmill. There was no rain, just dust and awfully hard wind blowing.

  We went to the basement because Mother thought it would be a tornado and, of course, we always went to the cellar for a tornado. My dad hadn’t come in yet from the barn and Mother was pretty worried because storms frightened her. The memory of her family’s sod house being destroyed by a tornado was still clear in her mind.

  Dad didn’t come in for the longest time. Finally he made his way in and said he’d gotten lost from the barn. It was dark and blowing dust so hard that he couldn’t see at all. He couldn’t see the light on the windmill or the lights in the house, and he couldn’t tell what direction to go to find the house from the barn. For twenty years, he had taken that path from the barn to the house and probably could have found his way blind-folded. Yet caught in the blackness of swirling dust, he became disoriented and lost in his own yard. Eventually the wind let up a little, enough so he could see the light on the windmill and he was able to find the house. He was completely covered in dirt, just black from head to toe.

  In the house, the dust was so thick we had to hold wet handkerchiefs over our faces so we could breathe. We went to bed that night with the sound of the wind howling and dust hitting the windows.

  In the morning, my friend and I woke up and looked at each other and started laughing. Our faces were gray, covered in dust. The quilt on my bed had lots of colors and designs on it, but now with the dust covering it so thickly it looked like gray velvet. About a half-inch of very fine dust covered the floors of the house. During the night, the dust had collected around the pig fence so much that it made a drift three feet high, and the pigs walked right over the fence.

  We listened to the radio and to the party line telephone to hear news about the storm. There were so many stories about people getting lost during the storm and stranded out on the roads.

  We had dirt roads, but the main roads to town had gravel on top. As people drove on them, gravel would build up along the edge of the road and make a raised line or ridge. On the rest of the surface, the gravel would get ground into the dirt until it was pretty much back to being a dirt road, but there would still be this ridge of gravel along the edge.

  That night cars stalled with the dust clogging the engines. The storm lasted through the night and people couldn’t stay in their cars. So they’d get out and almost crawl along the road following the ridge of gravel at the edge until they could get into Campbell, Inavale or whatever town was closest. A lot of the people said they crawled most of the way, because that was the only way they could tell where the gravel ridge was. They would feel it with their hands because they couldn’t see a thing, it was so dark with all the dust blowing.

  That was the worst of the dust storms, although we had others and always a lot of dust everywhere all the time. Nebraska is a very windy state anyway. There was a saying back then that when the wind blew from the south it blew our farm over to our neighbors. And then when the wind blows from the north, it will blow our farm back again. Another saying is that Nebraska only has three days of the week, because the wind blows four days out of the week.

  Mother finally gave up on beating the rugs and rolled them up and put them away, so we had no rugs on the floor. She took down the curtains becaus
e they collected too much dust. In those days, no one in the country had vacuum cleaners because very few homes had electricity. Our electricity was 32V, powered by a windcharger on top of the granary, and there were no 32V vacuum cleaners. Mother did what she could to sweep dust outside with her broom. But a broom doesn’t get much dust out of a rug. She took her heavy wool rugs out to hang on the clothesline, beating them over and over to try and get the dust out.

  The dust blew like snow and drifted like snow. Unfortunately, it didn’t melt like snow. We had a spare bedroom on the northwest corner of the house. One morning Mother and I went in there to clean and found dust piled on the floor at least ten inches high under both the north and the west windows. She sent me to get the bushel bucket and a shovel, and we shoveled the dirt into the bucket and then swept up the rest.

  To me, the Dust bowl and the Depression are interrelated, because together they changed things for a lot of families in our community. Before the Depression, our country school teacher was paid $100 a month. Then before the Drought really hit, it dropped down to $45 a month. In 1935, after the Dust Bowl and the Drought started, I got a school and started teaching for $35 a month. That was south of Red Cloud near the Kansas state line. Our community never went that low, only to $40 a month.

  A lot of the people in our community were affected, because they couldn’t raise much so didn’t have any money. All country women did their own sewing and made their own clothes, even before the Depression. But during the Depression, women would use the printed material from the feed sacks or flour sacks to make their dresses. They’d try to buy several sacks of flour in the same print to have enough for a dress.

  I went to Ladies Aid one time where ladies were showing off their dresses they had made from flour sacks. They were proud of them. Everybody was in the same boat, you know, nobody had any money. And if they had it, they weren’t spending it.