Farm Girl

by Karen Jones Gowen

  I was going to high school in Lincoln and I had to have fairly nice clothes to go to school in a big city. I had to buy clothes there in Lincoln, because you couldn’t get anything very good around where we lived. Mother bought a dress during this time at Penney’s in Red Cloud for thirty-seven cents, a plain dress with two holes for arms and a hole for the neck. No trim or anything, just plain material, blue with a little tiny flowered print.

  What I bought in Lincoln was a lot better than anything any of the kids in my neighborhood had. I had a red dress with leg of mutton sleeves, silk crepe, tight to the elbow and puffy from the elbow to the shoulder. Mother wanted me to have that dress, she loved red and always wanted me to wear red. I’d wear long hose, neutral rayon hose, and oxfords.

  When I went home on holidays and went to church, I felt so embarrassed because my clothes were so much nicer than what the other girls were wearing.

  I had a brown dress with buttons on the shoulders at both sides, two or three rows of white silk narrow braid outlining the shoulders. I got it at Miller and Paine in Lincoln. When school started, one of the girls in my class had a dress exactly like mine that she wore on the first day. She was bragging about how she’d gotten that dress in New York, and here I’d gotten mine right in Lincoln at Miller and Paine.

  The first year Mother took me shopping and after that, Aunt Bernice would take me. Sometimes I’d look and find things and Aunt Bernice would come see it. She supervised my spending from an account my dad had and she would get money out for me. We’d get our shoes polished in the basement at Miller and Paine for ten cents.

  Mother didn’t mind spending money on me, but she hated spending it on herself. Her shoes were always kind of worn out.

  Dad would say, “You know, Julia, you need to get good shoes.”

  But she would buy cheap shoes that didn’t support her feet well.

  Julia Marker

  Before the drought, the area got plenty of snow. This road, the mail route, was shoveled out by farmers so the mail car could get through.

  Chapter Fourteen:

  Seven-Year Drought

  Our neighbors a mile to the south of us sold their cattle for three cents a lb. then held an auction and sold everything. They just walked away from their farm and moved to Bakersfield. Another family four or five miles away did the same thing, and moved to Oregon. Also, that’s when my dad’s sister Aunt Leone and Uncle Bob left. They were renting, so they just left Nebraska and went to Missouri.

  Throughout the area that was the story, sell out and move where there was no drought or dust. But each year, my father and others stayed and kept planting their crops, believing “This year will be better.” And each year the dust kept on blowing, and the rains never came.

  It wasn’t until 1941 that they started having good crops again. It turned out to be a seven-year drought. They experimented with other crops that could grow in dry soil, like milo. ‘35 and ‘36 were the driest years, and after that they had a little more rain. When it did rain, there was so much mud because of all the dust. Those were the years that a lot of people moved out because they couldn’t raise anything.

  Some people didn’t have anything to feed the cattle because the drought had dried up the pasture as well as the crops. So then the government bought up the cattle for three or four cents a lb., or $3. for 100 lbs. We heard that the government shot a lot of them. People were saying the government would buy the cattle and then take them out and shoot them.

  Because they had a lot of good cattle, Dad and Uncle Ford went up to the sand hill area of Nebraska where it wasn’t affected by the drought. They bought an 800 acre ranch where there was a lot of good, green grass for the cattle to graze on. They took their cattle up there, sixty or eighty head of cattle. Dad and Uncle Ford had saved their money through the years, and they were older, not just starting out.

  Uncle Ford stayed up there on that ranch the first year. It was a nice farm, with a farmhouse, a barn, a well and everything. He had a couple good riding horses and Catherine and I would go up there and ride around. Dad and Ford’s nephew, Milton Lutz, who was Aunt Dora’s son, was their hired man. Milton had just gotten married, so he and his wife lived up there with the cattle after the first year, and Ford could come back and take care of his place.

  We did keep two or three cows, so we had plenty of milk. We had a garden near our house that we could water with the faucet and hose. So we’d have potatoes, of course, and onions, green beans and tomatoes. That was the main thing.

  Uncle Ed from Colorado would get cabbage from neighboring farms, and he’d bring a truckload of cabbage down to get rid of, to sell to people in our community. Mother bought the cabbage and made sauerkraut to keep through the winter. We had plenty of food, not like people in the cities who needed money to buy food. We could live on our garden produce, beef and pork from butchering, chicken, plenty of eggs, milk, butter and cream.

  There was a bad-tasting weed that replaced much of the grass in our pasture, and during a couple of summer months the milk became too foul to drink. Even the ice cream we made from that milk tasted awful. The pigs we kept consumed a lot of milk during those dry years, because what we couldn’t use we gave to them.

  Several of those summers during the Drought, the men didn’t have anything to do because there were no fields to cultivate, and they had to get rid of their cattle because there was no pasture. Most of the cattle had all been sold. So when the womenfolk had Ladies Aid, the men would play volleyball. They had a volleyball team and would go around and play teams in other communities.

  There were more girls in our community than boys, so the men talked us into having a girls’ softball team. We played in a league with other teams in the area. I was a pretty good pitcher. I pitched every game for as long as I could, then when my arm got tired, I played first base.

  There were two women in the community who thought we should put on some plays to keep people busy and entertain them. One of the women, Mrs. Brooks, was very literate, a good writer, so she wrote some plays and both women worked to direct them.

  One of the plays they bought was called Here Comes Charlie. It was about someone named Charlie who was going to come visit an aunt in town, and Charlie turned out to be a girl, a wild tomboy, and all kinds of funny adventures happened when Charlie came. It was performed at the school because of the auditorium. I was in college then, and was one of the young people in the play. I played the aunt. We sold tickets and collected a little money for it, to pay for the purchase of the plays.

  One summer about ‘35 or ‘36 was such a hot summer. One day I was visiting with my cousin Mildred Holt, who lived in the Norwegian community. She and I were both teaching in country schools by then, and we were always home summers. It was about 126 that day. It was time for noon dinner, and her mother took the butter out of the ice box and set it on the table. When the meal was over, the butter was completely melted, just a pool of yellow in the saucer.

  The Markers did alright during the Drought because my dad had saved his money and not gone into debt for anything. He and Mother had grown up the children of homesteaders who had to mortgage the farm to get by, and there was always the fear of losing it if you couldn’t pay the mortgage.

  Their parents had to work to break up the prairie sod that had never been plowed. Finally they’d get a crop that seemed promising. They looked for a good harvest so they could pay back the money borrowed for seed and machinery. Then a hailstorm would come and destroy their crop. The next year it might be grasshoppers that would darken the sky and eat everything right down to the ground. So another season would pass when they couldn’t pay their debt.

  My dad was just a boy, but he remembered what that was like and refused to go into debt. His parents had been forced to mortgage the farm to survive, but these were better times. He, and Uncle Ford too, paid for everything as they got it.

  But these times were getting to be like the old days. A year or two after the dust storms and the drought started,
the grasshoppers came.

  One hot day I was standing in the shade of the barn and saw lots of white specks floating along in the sky. A few specks dropped down, and I began to see grasshoppers here and there. That was just the beginning. Soon it was a cloud of grasshoppers that would land and be with us for several years. They chewed up what little there was of the field crops, they chewed the leaves and the bark off the trees. They would even eat bare wood. I saw hundreds of them gnawing away the handle of my dad’s pitchfork.

  After a year of grasshopper invasion, the county extension office offered farmers a poisoned bran. My dad bought several gunny sacks, and he and I threw handfuls of it on the branches of the pine trees in our yard, hoping to save them. They were our only trees that had survived the drought, as we had watered them with our hose. Our supply of well water depended on the wind blowing the windmill. We had plenty of wind and plenty of well water. We kept the hose running at the base of those trees, changing it about every hour.

  One of those summers, our corn was growing real well. My dad hoped to save it from the grasshoppers by using the poisoned bran. He walked down one row, and I’d walk four rows over, carrying the poison bran in large bags over our shoulders and tossing it along the corn rows until the entire field was covered.

  My dad and the other farmers who stayed did what they could each year. Finally in 1941, the rains came and they could start growing crops again.

  But after the long Drought, it never was the same. So many people had left the area, especially the young people who went elsewhere to earn a living. By then the War was on and many of the young men left to fight overseas. I was one of those who went off to college, then taught school for awhile and did a little traveling.

  At Northwestern University in Chicago, I met my future husband. We married September 16, 1944 and settled in Illinois, managing to get back to Nebraska once or twice a year.

  In 1949, Bill and I were living in Newman, Illinois. The parsonage had good wood floors, but no rugs. Mother gave us one of her nice wool rugs that she had rolled up during the Dust Bowl days.

  After sending it off to the cleaners, I unrolled it and lots of dust settled on the floor as it flapped down. I vacuumed it over and over, front and back, but never could get all the dust out. We used it for awhile, but when we moved to Peoria in 1950, I was glad to get rid of it.

  I saw no need to carry along the Nebraska dust. I had my memories of growing up as a Nebraska farm girl, the granddaughter of homesteaders, and those I would always take with me.

  Lieten yenta

  Appendix: Chapter Endnotes

  by Lucille Marker Jones

  THE WALSTADS

  In 1872, my grandfather Hans Walstad came from Norway to Iowa to Nebraska to become one of the first settlers in Webster County. The Norwegians would come out to Decorah, Iowa, a Norwegian town, and from there travel to various places to settle. My mother always said that her dad, Hans Walstad, was here before George Cather, but they called it Catherton Township just the same.

  Jakob and Karen Walstad lived on the Franklin County side and Hans on the Webster County side. The oldest daughter and her husband stayed in Norway, buying the parent’s farm for $1000. This is the money that Jakob and Karen brought to America

  One large family built a two-story frame house connected to their sod house. This is the only family I knew of who kept the original sod house, as most were glad to get rid of it and build a frame house.

  Sofie Walstad lived with us from 1924-26. Mother and Aunt Thilde would each take her for three months at a time. Thilde married Charlie Banks, a Swede, and they lived in the Scandinavian community four miles west of us. Their children were Clarence, Hazel and Stella. When the children got old enough for high school, the parents bought a farm near Inavale. Thilde had a Norwegian accent but not Mother. Mother wanted to be Americanized, and didn’t even cook Norwegian.

  “Lieten yenta” is Norwegian for “little girl.”

  THE MARKERS

  John Marker, my dad’s father, was married to Annie Elizabeth Wilson in Virginia, and they came out to Nebraska with her brothers Clarence, John, Arthur and Albert. The parents and two other married daughters didn’t come.

  Clarence had two sons and a daughter. His son Ray was superintendent of the church for years and kept it going. John Wilson probably did the best. He gave land for the school house and the New Virginia church.

  Aunt Elizabeth, a school teacher, became superintendent of schools in Red Cloud. When she married Will May, they moved to Lincoln and that’s where I stayed when I went to high school. Aunt Dora married John Lutz and they lived near Campbell. We always got together with their family at Christmas. After Dora, there was Carrie who married Ed Johnson. They had Cecil, Clayton and Gladys who had Downs Syndrome. Aunt Bernice taught school in Lincoln and never married. After Ford died, Bernice tried to live in their house alone, but ended up in a nursing home in Red Cloud as she had Alzheimers.

  THE NEW FARM

  My parents had lived on another place with old farm buildings and a little three-room house, but now that they were expecting a child my dad sold cattle and built a nice house. He wasn’t a carpenter, he had someone else do the work. My dad kept the old farm and the hired hand lived there and worked the land. Uncle Ford’s farm joined ours, so he and my dad often worked together to help each other.

  I remember two of the mail carriers, Claude Conley and later Gerald Leonard. Our box was there along with the ones for the Henry Williams and Jay Lovejoy families.

  Our fence was woven into long rectangles about an inch and a half wide and six inches long, and curved at the top into scallops. The wire used in this fence was very strong, maybe1/8" thick.

  MOTHER AND ME

  During the early years of the Depression, Mother subscribed to the “Comfort” magazine, published in New England. The back half of this magazine contained articles and letters written by subscribers telling about their hobbies. They would tell what they made that they would like to trade for something others had made. Mother would write to women in different states offering to trade an oil painting or a small pastel painting. I remember her receiving salmon from Washington, strawberries from Oregon, embroidered dishtowels and pillowcases, crocheted doilies, etc. One woman in Iowa pieced a quilt for a large oil painting, then Mother sent the quilt top to a woman in South Dakota who quilted it by hand for another oil painting. In fact, my hope chest consisted of dish towels, pillow cases, doilies, that quilt, all things that Mother had received in exchange for paintings.

  I didn’t care to do embroidery, crochet and so called fancy work. I preferred to read or play outdoors. Mother could do all that but she preferred creating other types of things, like beaded baskets and necklaces, painted winter bouquets from weeds and branches she gathered, plaster of Paris figurines and pictures she would mold, dry and paint. She would have loved ceramics, but back then in the 1920’s and 30’s she hadn’t heard of that.

  Mrs. Ellen Lambrecht also usually boarded the schoolteacher. One year when LaVerne Lambrecht was small, he got very sick with pneumonia, and his mother was busy caring for him so the teacher, Gertrude Wiggins, stayed several weeks at our place. We had a hired man, my cousin Milton Lutz, so lots of evenings, my Dad and I and Milton and Miss Wiggins played cards.

  MY PRETTY COUSIN CATHERINE

  There was some kind of fight later at the stadium, and after that the University of Nebraska never played Notre Dame.

  I think one of the reasons I whined and tried to get out of work around the house was because I really didn’t feel well much of the time. I had so many allergies and it seemed my nose was always stopped up. I didn’t eat right since I was such a picky eater, and was anemic, too. Mother took me to every doctor around, but they all had a different answer as to what my problem was and did nothing to help it.

  THE BEST DAD IN NEBRASKA

  The lady my mother worked for in Omaha gave my mother a porcelain doll that was slightly broken. The feet were broken off,
so Mother made a base for it out of plaster of Paris and kept it for years. This old lady lived in downtown Omaha. Everyone was trying to buy this woman’s house and she refused to sell. She had lived there for fifty years, since the Indians were around, and she told my mother about them coming to her door. Back then, this lady said, they didn’t dare have a light at night for fear the Indians would see it and come right into the house.

  THE NEW VIRGINIA COMMUNITY

  I went back in 1981 for the 100th reunion of the New Virginia Church, and that was fun seeing people. I saw Irving Brooks, who was in my class in high school, and he couldn’t figure out who I was. They had a program and a dinner, an all day affair, with a church service in the morning, picnic in the afternoon and another church service in the evening. The New Virginia Church was open until just a few years ago in the 1990’s, and they stopped services then because there’s hardly anyone living out there anymore. The ones who were coming had gotten old or moved away, so it wasn’t worth it to pay to keep it open, so they closed it. There’s a foundation that wants to keep it in good condition for funerals and weddings, and any community events could be held there. The church is on the Willa Cather tour.

  OUR CATHER CONNECTIONS

  Albert had come out in 1871 or ‘72, then his brothers came out around 1876 or ‘77. There were some Wilson sisters back in Virginia who were married who didn’t come to Nebraska, but all the Wilson brothers came. My dad’s father, John Marker, had married Lizzie Wilson in Virginia, and my dad was about three when his parents came West.

  Jessie Auld and my cousin Stella Fregulia, Mathilde’s daughter, were in the same PEO out in Palo Alto, California. Don’t ask me what PEO means, only the members know; but it is a service organization for women.