Personal

I was born in Story county, Iowa about seven miles southwest of Nevada, on December 12, 1896. A Dr. Smith from Nevada was called to usher me into the world. He held me up by the heels and spanked me to see if I'd squall. I did. Now, all this is just hearsay and so is the rest....They say, I was a pretty baby...Wow!

My father and mother were married in Iowa Center in February 1896. They raised their children on various farms in Story and Polk counties. They retired to an acreage at the north edge of Ames in 1939, where my father died in 1945..

I was the first born, then Maude, Ferne and Paul. In 1925 the family was delighted when little Ruby (a cousin) was adopted and joined the family.

In those days, all babies wore dresses and I think mine were the longest. Later, Mother had to shorten them or I couldn't have learned to walk. But, never the less, I still wore dresses, until I must have been four years old. Did I ever howl when I had to wear pants. Golly, I didn't know for sure if I was a boy, but when they finally told me "Now you look more like your Daddy", that mollified me, I guess. About the same time, I had those beautiful curls cut off and they were kept in a box for years.

Grandpa and Grandma Doggett lived in Ames. We always made the trip of about 20 miles with team and carriage. I really had fun at Grandpa's. I think this was a mainly because I have so many Uncles who were all there at home.

Family Life

In those days, when we sat down to dinner, the older people sat down to eat first and the children ate later. When, I was old enough to eat with my uncles, I had so much fun listening to seven Uncles argue. They argued about politics (election of Teddy Roosevelt), city affairs and just anything that came up. None of them agreed and they all tried to out-talk the other.

I liked to hear Grandpa play the fiddle. It was kept busy much of the time because Dad, Uncle Joe, Uncle Elmer and Uncle Harve all could play. Years later, my brother Paul and I both played. I think Paul may still have that old fiddle.

Uncle Bert worked in Cedar Rapids a street car conductor. When he came home, we would usually meet him at the Ames train depot. That depot was a busy place. There were trains arriving every few hours from distant places such as Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.

We had to keep out of the way of the freight carts that were pushed up and down the platform loading and unloading freight from the baggage carts. There was a very good restaurant at the depot. I have eaten there many times, paying twenty-five to fifty cents for a very good meal.

I used to think I'd like to be a musician like my Uncle Louis. He worked the drum end of the Ennis Band, later the Ames Municipal Band. He retired after about 46 years.

Uncle Joe was a painter and claimed to have painted nearly every house in Ames. I do know he painted the original Lincoln Highway markers which were placed along the highway across Iowa. They were cement posts and painted with red, white and blue bands. There is one now on display by the highway in front of the State Highway Commission (Iowa Department of Transportation)

He also painted a building at Iowa State University. It was all black inside and he got sick while painting. There were no windows in it at all. No one knew, at that time, what the building was going for. It turned out to be part of the Atomic Bomb development, the cyclotron.

Of my one aunt, seven uncles and Grandpa and Grandma, all are gone now and buried in the Ames Cemetery. My Dad, Mother and son, Thomas are buried there also. Of my mother's family, all are gone but Uncle Ernie Glasgow who will soon be 90 years old. He and his wife, Aunt Blanche, lead a very active social life in Nevada. The others are buried in the Iowa Center and Maxwell cemeteries.

Farm Life

To those of you who haven't been on a farm back in the time of 1910 to 1930, I can tell you that those were the days of real hard work. The hired man, for instance, worked six days a week and drew a wage of maybe $50 a month with room an board. Who ever heard of anybody taking a paid vacation. He might get a day off if it rained all day and the horse's harness was in good shape. (Hopefully, there would be no fences to fix or weed corners to mow with a hard scythe).

In most cases, the hired man was considered as almost one of the family, especially if he was a decent sort. I have seen those who have worked five or even ten years for the same farmer. They became part of the whole community. In many cases, the hired man was given help to get a start at farming on his own. On rare occasions, he married the boss's daughter or the hired girl.

Dad was always a renter and always preferred to pay the rent in cash rather than with shares of the crop. This would make it possible for him to make extra money on the sale of his produce, if he could get a good price for it. He was mainly a grain farmer, but usually raised quite a few hogs and some cattle for market. However, most of his cash income was from the sale of grain. Of course, the sale of sorghum we made in the fall, gave us a little extra cash.

The Life of a Farm Wife

My mother was very industrious and saving. She was, as they said, "a hard worker". She saw to it that the rest of us worked too. She raised and sold chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese. She bought most of the needed food supplies with the money from the sale of her eggs. One year she even sold the feathers from the geese.

She made most of the clothes for every member of the family. Then there were her quilts and the comforters for the beds. During the depression, she made our sheets and some of our clothes out of grain sacks. One thing, hardly any farmer ever had to resort to was living out of a tin can.

There was always a garden, a huge garden by today's standards and this was, primarily, my mother's responsibility. I think first on the list to be planted were the potatoes. These were planted on Good Friday. Next came peas and onions, because they withstood frost. Then beans, (soup or navy beans). We had lots of beans! Did you ever hear tomatoes called "Love Apples"?

Mother canned just about everything she raised in the garden. In addition to canning sweet corn, she also dried lots of corn, which was really a very simple matter. While cleaning corn for canning, she would lay out ears that she considered too hard for canning. The next day she would start drying this corn. First, she would slit down each row of kernels on the ear with a sharp knife and scrape out what was called the heart of the corn. This was put in a basin and then spread out on a cheese cloth and covered completely with a netting to keep the flies off. It was placed out in the sun and stirred once in awhile. It usually took a couple of days to completely dry. Then it was stored in tight containers. So our early American dehydrated vegetable only required soaking in water over night then cooking as usual.

My Dad's Responsibilities

My Daddy did his share and, believe me, I don't think a winter passed that we didn't have 10 to 20 bushels of potatoes stashed away in the cellar. We didn't have basements, but the little old cellars were very good places to keep fresh vegetables. The onions we pulled were tied together and hung on nails. I imagine we had a couple bushels of those. Another vegetable we stored was turnips.

Our old cellar wasn't very wide, but was about as long as the house. It had a dirt floor and was walled up with rock. There were twelve inch shelves on each side. The bin at the far end was where Dad kept the potatoes. It was very dark down there, so we had to take a lantern for light. There were no flashlights in those days. Sometimes when we kids were sent down to get something, we would deliberately make a mistake and bring up what we wanted instead of what Mother had sent for.

General Farm Life

Another thing we did, in the fall, was to pick apples to make cider. We had very few wormy apples, but we always had to look out for them. We cut the stem and blossom ends out and quartered them, watching out for a worm. The good apples went into the press. It held about a gallon or two of apples. There was a press that fit down on the apples, operated by a screw on top. The more you screwed it down, the more juice you got out of the apples. That apple juice was just plain apple juice until it had a little age, then you had Apple Jack!.

If we had any Apple Jack in our house, believe me, my mother threw it away. No one got to drink any of it around here. But, once in awhile she would take a half gallon or so and, not caring whether it was soured or not, she put a little vinegar mother in it. Then she would have her vinegar. We hardly ever bought any vinegar.

Mother also made lots of apple butter. I can't tell you how she made it. But I do know it was powerful good, any time. It was best on a piece of warm freshly baked bread. Of course, she made all our bread. I do know that she put up more than a gallon or two of apple butter each winter.

One thing that delighted Mother, was to work in her strawberry patch. She could get so many quarts of fruit out of it. I'll tell you, I've bent my back out there many and many a time. Mother and the girls were right there with Dad and me. We would pick strawberries until we had a couple dishpans full. We would take them up to the house and clean them, washing two or three times. Mother would usually have 75 quarts of strawberries ready for "when the snow flies". Of course, that doesn't include the jam, jelly and "sunshine" she made. When I think of it though, she must have put up more tomatoes than anything else..

Mother always had from 300 to 500 chickens. At first, she raised the chickens that the mother hens hatched, but for many years she had an incubator of about 150 chick capacity. Later on, she bought her baby chicks from the hatchery and kept them, at first, in a heated area called a brooder. The baby chicken house, with a brooder in it, was naturally called a brooder house.

It was lot of work to look after these baby chicks. The brooder had to be kept at a constant temperature, not to hot, not too cold. Either of these conditions could kill the chicks. Their water had to be warm and, of course, very special baby chick food was rationed out.

I forgot to say, that before the brooder house was used each spring it had to be completely cleaned. This was usually done by brushing it all over with whitewash, even the floors. The floors were kept covered with clean straw. When the chickens were large enough so they did not need extra heat, they were moved to a much larger chicken house. In fact, many farmers built a very small, brooder house every year then burned it down when they were through with it for the year. This way there was no chance of transferring any disease to the new baby chicks.

One of the hardest jobs for my mother was washing clothes. The first washing machine, I remember, was a wooden tub on a stand that we kept on the back porch. On wash day, in the winter, we moved it into the kitchen. In the summer it was in the back yard. The worst part was hauling the water from the windmill. When she was finished, the kitchen floor was mopped with the wash water. Then, there is all that water to be carried outdoors, across the yard and emptied. OH, my achin' back!