Dillon S. Myer Oral History Interview, Chap I-IV

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview donated to the Harry S. Truman Library. The reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word, although some editing was done.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the Regents of the University of California and Dillon S. Myer and Jenness Wirt Myer, dated July 7, 1970. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to Dillon S. Myer and Jenness Wirt Myer until January 1, 1980. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of the Bancroft Library of the University of California.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with Dillon S. Myer and Jenness Wirt Myer requires that they be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

Opened July, 1970
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

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CHAPTER I

GROWING UP ON THE FARM IN THE 1890’s AND EARLY 1900’s

DSM: I was born and reared on a typical corn belt farm of 135 acres in central Ohio in a family of four; one older brother and two younger sisters. My pre-college days lay entirely within the horse and buggy era and before automobiles and tractors were generally used. Consequently communication was not easy between communities.

One of my very earliest memories has to do with a visit that we made to some relatives of my father, by the name of Myer, in the northern part of Licking County. It was a large county, and I must have been only two years old, possibly three.

During that visit I wandered away from the family and out into the yard where some bee hives were located. Being quite young and inexperienced I didn’t know what bee hives were. It seems that I picked up a corn cob and was beating on the hives, and the bees, of course, swarmed around me and stung me rather badly. One of the older girls in the family, when she sensed what was going on, picked me up and carried me out of the range of the bees. Another sister ran into the garden, pulled up some green onions, brought them back, cut them up, and put the green onions on the stings which helped to alleviate the soreness. I suppose it had something to do with stopping the poison. I have found, throughout the years, that this is an antidote for bee stings. This experience was so vivid that it happens to be, I think, the first thing that I can recall.

I can still remember what those bee hives looked like. They were painted white, and they were just about my height because I think they had put what we know as supers on top of some of the hives. As

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a consequence when I think of bee hives, I think of that kind of bee hive that I saw at that stage. It was a square bee hive.

I learned from that experience that onions were a good antidote for bee stings. Years later, when my youngest daughter was about five, we had moved to Palls Church, Virginia, and I was working out in the yard one nice sunny day and had mowed the yard. I sat down to talk to somebody when she came rushing out and plopped down beside me, putting both hands on the grass as she sat down, and she put one hand right down on a honey bee. I had my knife in my pocket and I immediately pulled up a wild onion, which was easy to do because we had lots of them, and cut one in two and put it on the palm of her hand, which had been stung, and said "Close your hand and hold it for a little bit," which she did. As a consequence she had no after effects from the bee sting.

There are two other early memories that may be interesting. One of them had to do with the cutting of my curls. In those days little boys, as well as little girls, wore curls until they were at least four or five years old. I don’t remember a great deal about mine except that I do remember that I was told to go and look at my curls in the looking glass for the last time. And crazily enough I remember getting a chair and moving it in front of the looking glass, which I had to do because I wasn’t tall enough to see in the glass otherwise, and took a last look at my curls before they were whacked off.

The other incident was not one that I like to recall. Nevertheless it was an incident of some importance in my younger days. My Father was preparing to plant potatoes in the spring of the year and he found that he did not have enough seed potatoes to plant the ground that he had in mind; so he asked my brother and me to go to a neighbor’s, who lived at least three quarters of a mile away, and ask him if we could borrow a few seed potatoes to finish out the job. My brother was eight years old and I was five. So we hied across the fields.

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When we arrived at Mr. Bert Neel’s place Mrs. Neel said she was sorry but that Mr. Neel wasn’t there just then, but he would be back after a little bit and why didn’t we go with Minnie, her daughter, down to see the deer which Mr. Neel had brought back from a hunting trip and had put into a deer lot that he had built. Of course, this was very intriguing. So we spent some time watching the deer and playing about until Mr. Neel returned.

We finally got the potatoes and took them home. When we arrived home we found my Father in a rage because he had been waiting for quite some time. He had told us to hurry and we had not hurried. So he cut a peach switch and gave us both a switching.

It just so happens that I had on my first pair of little boy short pants which my Mother had made with her own hands. They were a beautiful blue and to get a switching the first time I wore these pants was bad business as far as Mother was concerned. I remember very distinctly that she wept some tears which, I think, was the only time in her life that she wept when I was punished.

When I was five, my brother, of course, had already been in school for some time, having started at age six. I was very much interested in learning to read. So my Father, who at times had great patience, taught me to read in the first reader, McGuffy's First Reader as a matter of fact.

So by the time I started school, at age six, I was able to avoid the so-called chart class, which they had in those days. I remember taking very great pleasure during the first years in school in watching the chart class stand up in front of the chart with the teacher with a pointer, spelling out C-A-T, R-A-T, D-O-G, and all the simple words, and thinking I was awfully glad I hadn’t had to go through that.

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The Country School

DSM: We went to a one-room country school which was at least a mile, probably one and one half miles, from home. We walked to school and home again each school day except in times of very bad weather. Occasionally in the wintertime, if we had a blizzard or a heavy snow and the snow was deep, Dad would take us on horseback with the two of us riding behind him. He would drop us off and then maybe come for us in the afternoon if the storm continued.

A little later on he decided it wasn’t necessary for him to go so when we got old enough he allowed us to ride old "Queen" which was one of our driving horses. He put a blanket on her, strapped it on and we two would ride to school where we would tie the reins up, turn her loose, and she would go home, which of course was easier than walking in heavy snow when the snow was hard to plod through.

One of my earliest memories, in my first few weeks of school, was the fact that we had a lady teacher by the name of Lottie Horn who lived just across the road from the school; a very lovely person. One morning I felt that I needed to go very badly to what we would call the bathroom nowadays, the toilet, and I held up my hand. She very sweetly said "We will have recess in a few minutes. I think you can wait." Well, I couldn’t wait. As a consequence I flooded the area and she sent me home for a change of clothes. She was very contrite and I never had any problem after that when I held up my hand.

We had Miss Horn for a period of a couple of years. Then we had a man teacher, by the name of Mac Mossman, who only lasted a year. Unfortunately, I turned out to be teachers pet under Mac Mossman which embarrassed me no end because I didn’t care for him and none of the students did. He was always saying something that embarrassed me such

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as "Would a good little boy put some coal in the stove?" or something of that kind.

One of the things that I remember about Mac Mossman was that he chewed scrap tobacco. He kept his tobacco in the coal house and the door was just behind the teacher s desk. One noon, when he had gone away temporarily, a bunch of us boys got into the coal house, found his tobacco and scattered it all over the coal so that he would have had to pick it up bit by bit. We also found some switches which he had cut for use on the older boys if they got out of hand. We ringed those with a knife so that if he did use them they would break into pieces.

HP: Did fellow students kid you about being "the good little boy?"

DSM: Oh sure. That is what irked me. I didn’t mind being the good little boy but I didn’t like being kidded about it.

Our next teacher was the one that was a real teacher, and who was there the rest of my time in elementary school or country school. I went to country school, by the way, from age 6 to age 14. Mr. Harvey Orr was an excellent teacher.

As I remember it, I think I learned as much from listening to the older scholars reciting their lessons as I did from reciting my own. We had long recitation benches in the front of the room and they were called up to do their reading or their language or their arithmetic or what not. Of course, in a one-room school everything is open to everybody. I remember quite distinctly listening to many many recitations and repetitions of reading lessons, reading of poems, reading of prose, and so on, out of the old McGuffy Readers.

After I had been in school for quite some time, during my last two years, I was the only scholar in what would now be called seventh and eighth grade. Consequently, the teacher was able to devote a great deal of time to one student.

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Fortunately, he was a man of some learning and some imagination. He did such things as to provide extra work which was not in the curriculum. For example, he provided a course in orthography, which was a course on the origin of words. This has been very helpful to me throughout the years.

During my last year or two in school we read Shakespeare part of the time. We read such Shakespearian plays as "A Winter’s Tale", "The Merchant of Venice", "Midsummer Night’s Dream", and one or two others.

I also remember that there was no school library in those days, but Mr. Orr felt that there should be one so he, with his own hands, built a bookcase which could be locked and put it in one corner of the schoolroom. He brought his own library to the school; allowed us to take out books; take them home to read; and, of course, they were also properly returned. This was quite an unusual thing in those early days.

In those days, the country school teacher got a very small salary. I’m sure that Harvey Orr received only $30 a month when he started teaching and never more than $40 during a school year. He provided his own house. There were no fringe benefits, except occasionally if he didn’t want to go home and it was bad weather, somebody in the neighborhood, usually it was the Myers, provided a place for him to stay all night and provided some meals.

There was a time, previous to this, when many of the country teachers "boarded around" but he didn’t "board around." He lived at a place called Jacksontown which was about three and a half or four miles away. He drove every morning and put his horse in the barn, at the neighbor’s across the way. He had a family of at least three children whom I can remember. They went to school in their own community. He raised truck crops during the summer to supplement his wages.

HP: He sold them?

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DSM: Yes. He peddled his crops at Buckeye Lake among the summer cottagers.

We had an eight months school in those days. He got $240 a year, and later he got $320 a year.

HP: Had he been to college?

DSM: No. I’m sure he hadn’t been to college. He was pretty much self-educated beyond the common schools. I’m not sure that he had been to high school because they didn’t have many country high schools in those days, but he was a great reader. He believed in good literature. He believed in a sound basic education, and he was a wonderful teacher. I was most fortunate that I was able to have him for a period of five years of my country or elementary schooling.

One other incident that I remember about Harvey Orr: In the state of Ohio we had the Patterson Examinations or Boxwell Examinations. If you passed an examination, which was given on a county-wide basis, you could go to high school of your choice and have your tuition paid. Well, I took the examination. It just so happened that Harvey Orr, along with two other teachers from around the county, was one of the three examiners who supervised the exams.

Much to my amazement, about three or four weeks after the examinations were given, Harvey Orr drove his horse and buggy into our place one day and turned around. My Dad went out to talk to him and then he called me. When I went out he presented me with a book, which as I remember was "The Seven Wonders of the World", and the book was a reward for having won the top grade in the county in mathematics. I smile every time I think of this because it was the last time I ever won a top grade in mathematics. I didn’t do too well in Algebra and Geometry in high school and I took no mathematics when I went to college. I saw to it that I avoided mathematics.

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I ought to go back, I think, to the period of Mac Mossman for a moment to recall one rather important and exciting incident. At least it was exciting for most of the youngsters.

He got all excited one day and rushed all of us outside with the statement that the greatest invention of the age was coming up the road. When we got outside and lined up in front of the school house, here came Mr. Dave Black of Newark, Ohio, in his "one-lunger" automobile with a dashboard and, of course, with the kind of handle that you had in those days instead of a steering wheel. He had on a linen duster, a cap with goggles, and all of the gear of the early day automobilist. It happens that I had seen Dave Black before in his automobile because he occasionally came out to the reservoir, which was near our place. But most of the kids had not. It must have been around 1899 because I was just a youngster. I don’t think I was over eight years old at that time.

In those days, of course, when you drove the team hitched to the surrey to church on Sunday and you met an automobile, which wasn’t often, you got out and held the horses by their heads while it passed, to keep them from jumping over the fence.

Much of the social life in my early days, during the country school period, revolved around the school or around the church. The school social life had to do mainly with such things as box socials. This, of course, was a social where the ladies and the girls each brought a box, which they had packed themselves, and then these boxes were auctioned off. The men and the boys bid for the box. One of the ways to make money for the school was to find one or more who wanted a certain girl’s box and were willing to bid for it and it went up sometimes to enormous sums such as $1.50 or $2.00, which was a lot of money in those days.

HP: What was in the box? Food?

DSM: Yes, food. There was food in the boxes.

HP: What was considered a good box?

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DSM: Oh, sandwiches and cake or fried chicken - the kind of thing that was easy to pack in a box and, of course, it was a picnic type of meal.

Another school affair, which was quite general in those days, was the spelling bee. Nearly everybody in the community attended and some of the older folks participated.

Family Life

DSM: Spelling was a very important matter in our family. We used to have spelling bees around the supper table, after we had finished our evening meal, and my Dad and my Mother enjoyed them, I’m sure, more than we did, at that time, because they were good spellers and they wanted to be sure that we would be.

HP: How did you do it? Did you have a spelling book that your Father would read from?

DSM: Oh, no. Normally they would just remember words they had spelled throughout the years and they would give them to us to spell. They would pronounce them and we would do the spelling. I remember one that Dad always enjoyed using was the volcano in Mexico which he called "Popocātapetal" which in Spanish is pronounced "Popocatēpetl." He thought that was great fun to throw this one out at us because he had, I think, gotten stuck on it in a spelling bee at sometime or other. These home spelling bees, as I said, took place after supper in the dining room.

My Mother, in particular, was very interested in seeing to it that her youngsters knew how to speak the English language. She was very careful to correct us if we didn’t pronounce words properly. She was very insistent that we study our language and grammar lessons. If need be, she was helpful,

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for she knew a good deal about grammar and language because she was interested in it. Of course, as I have already indicated, she was very interested in seeing to it that we knew how to spell. This, I’m sure, was helpful, not only at that time but in later life because it was drummed into us day after day.

In the same way, as I began to grow up, she would slap me on the shoulder blades every time I passed and tell me to straighten up so that I wouldn’t be stooped, as tall boys very often are.

HP: Describe how it was around the dinner table. Was it in the kitchen or the dining room?

DSM: We always ate in the dining room. Our kitchen was small and we had a fair-sized dining room. We ate all our meals in the dining room.

HP: Did your Mother use a white table cloth?

DSM: Oh yes. Occasionally, during the week, we would use a white-and-red-squared tablecloth but usually it was white. Mother believed in white tablecloths.

My Dad sat at the head of the table and always gave the blessing and, if somebody had been particularly bad or some incident had stirred him up, sometimes he ran on and on. Sometimes we would glance at each other and think "Boy, are we getting it on the chin." But usually it was very short and very sweet.

HP: What sort of grace would he say?

DSM: He would ask for a blessing on the food, and bless the members of the family. If he felt other people should be blessed he would bring them in too.

Mother sat across the table from me, which was at my Dad’s left; my brother sat next to me; my Grandmother Myer sat at the other end of the table; and then the two young girls sat next to Mother on the other side of the table.

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HP: I wonder why your Grandmother sat at the end. Was it near the kitchen for your Mother to get up or did she sit on the side or what?

DSM: Grandmother always considered that this was her house. My father was the only boy in her family. She married a widower who had lost his first wife. He was older than she was and Dad was born when she was 43 years of age in 1861. He was the only child she ever had. She wasn’t married until she was 42. So when Dad got married Mother came into their home and I might say she had a very tough life until my Grandmother’s death many years later.

HP: Did you realize this as a child?

DSM: Oh yes, many times. Every so often Dad would take Grandmother into the living room; close the doors; and we were barred for two or three hours, while they argued out something that had to be argued because Mother had gotten to the end of her rope.

Grandmother sat at the end of the table because she probably always had sat there before Mother came on to the scene. I don’t know. In any case, it was accepted.

HP: Was there ever argument in front of you children, or how did you know that your Mother was unhappy about her Mother-in-Law?

DSM: We knew that Mother was unhappy at times by her attitude mainly, and occasional comments.

HP: Was your Grandmother bossy or critical or what?

DSM: Grandmother liked to take over and to run things. She was always wanting to do things which sometimes were in Mother’s way. Her final act, that led up to her demise, happened while Dad and Mother and all of us had gone away. She decided to do some ironing, which she wasn’t supposed to do, and she fell over a threshold of the door and broke her hip. She was in bed for a year and she got well enough that she got up to walk some but died from

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uremic poisoning from being bedfast so long. She was 94 years of age at the time of her death.

Generally speaking Grandmother was good to us. She was for the most part kindly. There were certain times when she tried to manage us. We didn’t care for that but she was usually good to us.

One of the things that I remember very well was that she had begun to develop cataracts as she got older and she couldn’t thread her own needles. I think I threaded hundreds of needles for Grandmother when I was a kid. Every time she needed a new threading I was available. I was the one who did the threading for one reason or another.

One other thing that we helped her do was to find her spectacles. About half the time they were pushed up on top of her head where she had forgotten she had put them.

HP: There was nothing that could be done for cataracts in those days?

DSM: Well, at least nothing was done. I don’t remember. I suppose they were not operable in those days. I don’t think they had developed the techniques but I’m not sure about that.

Another thing that I was always called on to help Grandmother do was to pick greens in the spring. She loved greens. We picked dandelion, narrow dock, lambs quarter, and what have you. I have forgotten some of the others but, oh yes, horseradish leaves.

I might say she also loved horseradish and every so often I had to help her dig horseradish root and helped to grate it which, of course, brought tears to the eyes.

HP: Grated raw?

DSM: Yes. I still like horseradish in spite of the discomforting experience.

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Household and Farm Chores

DSM: Youngsters growing up on a farm in those days were expected to help with the farm chores just as soon as they were able. In my own case the first chores allotted to me were the gathering of eggs and the carrying in of kindling wood for the kitchen stove and the heating stove. At that stage, I didn’t have to cut the kindling but I did have to carry it in. A little later I was expected to fill the wood box in the kitchen.

HP: From the first grade age or even before that?

DSM: Yes. I started doing both chores when I was around five.

HP: Did you have a basket or a bucket to put the eggs in?

DSM: Oh yes, and occasionally, of course, there were broken eggs.

HP: Did you ever break any?

DSM: Oh sure.

Following the period when I began to cut the kindling, to gather it and to carry in the wood to fill the wood boxes, I unfortunately decided that Id like to learn to milk; so at age seven I started milking. I was never relieved of the task until I left home at age 22 after I had finished college.

HP: Can a seven year old really milk?

DSM: Sure, I did.

HP: Were your hands big enough?

DSM: Oh yes. I didn’t milk some of the cows at first because their teats were a little large for seven-year-old hands but I could milk most of them. My

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brother didn’t like to milk so he took care of the horse stables and the horse barns which he loved. I had to do the cow barns, which I resented throughout the years, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. The pattern was already fixed.

Other chores during this period had to do with feeding the stock, both in the barns and in the lots. We put fodder out for them after we turned them out from the barns.

HP: Everyday?

DSM: We fed them twice a day. In the morning and evening, and the cleaning of stables was done once a day, including putting down new bedding.

HP: Every day?

DSM: This was routine every day during the winter.

We didn’t keep them in the barns during the summer. Normally you turned them out at night, and just let the cows in long enough to milk.

The horses were brought in to curry and to harness. During the season when we used teams the currying and harnessing of horses to get them ready for the field was a chore before breakfast every morning. This was in addition to the other chores. The horses had to be ready to go when the signal was given after breakfast.

The worst chore that I ever had, and one that I still don’t like to think about but which I can still do, was the sawing and splitting of wood for both the cook stove and the heating stoves. This went on from fall until spring. All winter long. Any time we had left before school, we got out the crosscut saw and sawed off a few chunks of wood.

HP: How far away was the wood?

DSM: The wood yard was right between the house and the barn.

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HP: Even in bad weather?

DSM: Oh yes. Unless the weather was awfully bad, we sawed wood or split wood and carried in wood; both before and after school and, of course, on Saturdays. Most of the day on Saturdays during the winter months we sawed, split and carried wood. We didn’t use much wood during the summer. We had stored enough and stocked enough in cords to carry us through the summer for cooking and the wash house.

HP: How big were the logs?

DSM: Some of the logs were two or three feet in diameter. We took down trees and would haul the logs up to the wood yard. We usually sawed them up there. On Saturday we sometimes sawed the wood in the woods and loaded the chunks onto the wagon or sled and hauled them up and dumped them into the wood yard.

We had enough logs right at hand so that before and after school we always had plenty to saw on. They ranged anywhere from a foot in diameter to two or three feet in diameter. Some of them were pretty knotty such as elm, beech, and oak. Certain parts of those trees didn’t split very easily. I have always wished we could have had wood like they have on the West Coast such as fir and some of that beautiful straight grained wood. I still would like to take an ax and split some of it just for the pleasure of knowing how it felt to split wood without knots in it.

HP: It must be easier to split then.

DSM: Very much, yes.

HP: And every bit of fuel in the house? What did you use for illumination? Kerosene?

DSM: Kerosene lamps were used entirely for illumination. Outside of kerosene in the lamps, every bit of fuel used in the house was prepared by the three

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"men" of the family, and a occasional "hired man." We used wood until we got free gas.

Speaking of kerosene lamps, that was another chore that I had to help my Grandmother with. My Grandmother always cleaned the lamps, refilled them and cleaned the wicks on Saturday when I was available. So I helped to clean the lamps, clean the chimneys, snuff the wicks, fill the lamps with "coal oil" as kerosene was called, wipe them off again, and to get them back into their proper place in the house.

HP: Did you ever get a kerosene cook stove?

DSM: No. Fortunately, we never had a kerosene cook stove. I hate the smell of kerosene to this day.

HP: How many lamps were there?

DSM: As I remember it, we had a couple of lamps in the kitchen; one on each side of the kitchen that hung in brackets. We had, usually, a couple in the living room and, of course, we had one or two in the dining room. We had a beautiful lamp in the parlor, tall lamp with a big globe with flowers on it.

HP: Standing or hanging?

DSM: Standing, the kind that you put in the middle of the table. It had a smaller chimney than the others that came up through the beautiful flowered china globe.

HP: Is it still in there?

DSM: No. I don’t know what happened to it. It’s been gone for quite some time. I don’t know where it went.

HP: Then when you went to bed did you carry a lamp upstairs with you?

DSM: No. We kids usually went to bed without a light. If we needed a light, we had a lamp in each of the rooms.

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Grandmother most often carried a lamp upstairs with her because she didn’t see too well. During the wintertime, she also carried her soapstone wrapped in a piece of blanket or a hot flat iron, if the soapstone wasn’t handy. She would turn her bed clothes back and iron the bed or smooth the bed with the hot iron or soapstone before she crawled in and then she put the soapstone at her feet. If we were ill with a cold, we usually got a soapstone or an iron at our feet. Otherwise we crawled into a cold bed.

We hadn’t any heat upstairs excepting that in Dad and Mother’s room, a large room upstairs; they had put a radiator, a sort of drum with vents in it, on the pipe from the stove downstairs. This threw a little more heat into that room but the other rooms were just plain cold. There was no reading in bed in those days.

The Miracle of Free Gas

DSM: Illumination by gas light and the doing away with wood sawing and wood cutting had to await the arrival of free gas, which happened when they began to drill gas wells throughout our community. They found some gas and before we had a well of our own, they wanted to come across our place with a gas line which would supply gas to Buckeye Lake Park which was then developing. As a result of wanting that right-of-way, we were able to get free gas for years for two houses; for the tenant house and for our main house.

HP: For illumination and heat both?

DSM: We used it for heat, and illumination.

HP: Cooking?

DSM: And cooking. It was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me as a kid.

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HP: I’ll bet. At what age did this happen?

DSM: I think I was around twelve when the gas field began to open up and, as a consequence, there was no more wood sawing by the time we were ready to start to high school.

We put in a furnace and had central heat. All you had to do was turn on the gas, light a match, throw it in and boom! away it went. I’ll tell you that was a thrill, a real thrill.

We had a barnyard light, at that time, with free gas. We didn’t burn it like some people did as a open flame; we put mantles on ours. That was the beginning of an easier life.

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CHAPTER II

FARM OPERATIONS

DSM: Other than the farm chores, the seasonal farm work, the field work which we did throughout my young life, we did such off-season work as cutting weeds in grain fields and pastures, such as dock and mullein; in the wheat fields very often you would find wild mustard which had to be pulled; hoeing in the garden; the weedy spots in the corn field had to be hoed. We helped with that along with my Dad and the hired man.

Land preparation, including plowing with walking plows, harrowing either with spiked tooth or disk harrows, dragging or rolling prior to planting; all this came with growing up.

HP: I suppose it was unthinkable to say "Well, I don’t like this kind of work. I want to be a school teacher" or something like that.

DSM: It never occurred to anybody at that age to say "I don’t like this kind of work" because Dad would have said "That’s just too bad."

Speaking of this, I was hauling hay shocks as a very small kid. We used to haul hay shocks up to the stackers; some people called them hay doodles, You would take one horse and a rope and you would run the rope around the bottom of the shock so you could drag it up to the stack for the men to pitch it up onto the stack.

I got very tired one day and the horse that I was riding was bothered by nit flies. She kept throwing her head, and it bothered me. On one of my trips to the stack I complained about the head tossing to the pitchers, and one of them said, "Oh, that’s nothing to worry about," and as he unhitched

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the rope from the shock he gave Queen, the mare I was riding, a whack on the rump with his fork handle. She started in a gallop which increased in speed, and about half way down the field I bounced off, but held on to one hame for a bit, but I finally dropped to the ground and the horse galloped right over me. I just laid there until the hired man came running over and said "Jump up; you're not hurt," So I jumped up and sure enough my pride was the only thing hurt.

They corralled Queen, and then my Dad went and got an old nag called "Old Doll", that belonged to a neighbor. She was sway backed and didn’t have enough stamina to toss her head around. I had to ride her the rest of the day but he rewarded me by saying "I will give you a nickel if you will finish out the day." The nickel was important. It is the only reward of that kind that I can remember, but it was a very important nickel.

HP: You were a contributing member to the farm economy almost from the time you could walk.

DSM: Oh yes, almost from the time we could walk.

Other farm tasks included cultivating corn and potatoes either with a single cultivator, with a one-horse cultivator, or a double cultivator which used a team and straddled the rows; harvesting of hay, wheat, corn, potatoes and occasionally barley or oats , if we were growing those, which we didn’t do every year.

Hay harvest in the early days included machine mowing; tedding, in order to help the hay to dry; raking with either a wooden dump rake, which you walked behind and raised the handle up enough so that the rake would catch and flop over and leave a wind row, or a little later we used a sulky rake. It was a horse drawn rake which was self dumping, if you tripped it at the right time with your foot. This was an improvement.

HP: I’ve never known what a wind row is.

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DSM: A wind row is the row of hay that is left after you have raked it up. Usually you put it in rows. You try to line it up. You dumped it each time as you came around so that there were long rows so that we could drive your wagon right down beside them and load them; or you could shock the hay more easily with pitch forks.

HP: It has nothing to do with being a wind break?

DSM: No. Where it got its name wind row I don’t know. It is one of those things I have wondered about but I never have looked up and no one has ever told me.

Shocking, or as some people called it doodling, you did with pitch forks out of the wind row. You built shocks which were about as high as a normal individual and sloped the sides so that if it rained it shed the rain. Most of the hay in those days had a good deal of timothy in it. Even though it was a clover meadow they put timothy with it and it was very easy to shock.

As I have already indicated after the shocks had been in the field for a while to mature a bit and dry out thoroughly, they were hauled to a stack by boys on horseback to be pitched onto a stack by pitchers.

Stacking was usually done by somebody who knew how to stack hay; who had a lot of experience, and who knew how to make the right bulges and draw it in at the right time. Very often if they didn’t do it right the stack would fall over. It would start leaning and over it would go.

HP: How big is a stack?

DSM: Well, it all depends. If we had lots of hay we ricked it. A rick is a long stack with a narrow ridge along the top equal to a double or triple stack.

An individual stack was built on a wooden bottom. We always used rails to set it on. We

[22]

would lay down a square of rails and build our stack on that. It was rounded and then pointed out at the top.

HP: To keep it off the ground?

DSM: The rails would keep it off the ground. It would rot on the ground if rails were not used.

HP: And then was it left out all winter?

DSM: It was also a good arrangement so we could poke the rabbits out from under those haystacks.

It was left out all winter or until you were ready to use it. If it was ricked, you usually used the hay fork and cut down through it and hauled in a portion as you had space for it in the mow. Usually you still had stacks available when spring came. If you had any left over you usually sold it if there was a good prospect for another year.

HP: Was the mow the loft of the barn?

DSM: That’s right. The hay mow is the loft of the barn.

In those days we had room for stabling cows and horses but we had very little mow room so we didn’t put in a great deal of hay. Most of it was stacked out.

I have already indicated that one of the early jobs was hauling hay shocks to the people who were the pitchers at the stacks, either for my Dad at home or for neighbors. The first money I ever remember earning was at the rate of twenty-five cents a day for hauling hay shocks for the neighbors.

HP: How long a day?

DSM: We worked from 7:30 in the morning until dark or thereabouts. A ten hour day, at least, if they had that many shocks to haul and they usually did. Your bottom got pretty sore by the time the

[23]

day was over because you were riding a horse all day long with some harness on it.

HP: You rode a horse and dragged?

DSM: Oh sure. They had a man in the field who did the hitching for you. You went back and forth all day long hauling in one shock at a time.

HP: You didn’t have to get down off the horse? You Just stayed on?

DSM: We stayed right on the horse. However, if we did not have enough extra help as we got a little older, we older boys would sometimes jump off the horse and do our own hitching.

After the twenty-five cents per day I did have two or three years when I got fifty cents a day for either carrying water or hauling hay shocks.

HP: And this was your own money?

DSM: This was my own money. It was important money because it was mine.

Then about 1906, I can’t remember exactly, but I think it was about the time I started high school, we talked my father into building a barn. Every body else was building barns having big hay mows. The new barn had not only a hay fork on a track which was able to pick up hay in large lots, dump it into the mow and with very little work on the part of the people in the mow, it could be stored away in rather large lots.

This led to the purchase of a mechanical hay loader, which meant that we took the hay right out of the swaths; the loader picked it up by a system of revolving rakes; brought it up onto the wagon; and if you would allow it to do so, would push it far enough forward that you didn’t have to do much loading. The first year we got it my brother and myself nearly killed ourselves trying to keep the hay out of the mouth of the loader but it wasn’t necessary. We learned after

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a while to let the team push it forward. It got a little heavy for them but we just kept it on the wagon. That’s about all.

The hay had to dry enough that it would not spoil in the mow. But with a hay loader, my brother and I usually did the gathering of the hay in the field and took it in. We usually ran two wagons. We would take the team off one wagon and hitch it to an empty one, which they had just emptied by the use of the hay fork, and we kept hay coming on.

My Dad would stick the hay fork and drop the hay in the mow, and the hired man, and if we had an extra hand two of them, mowed it away. This meant that the labor force during hay harvest was reduced very drastically. There was a time when we had as many as eight or ten men working in harvest but with four men we could do a pretty good job. We could even do it with three if we had to.

We finally got to the place that one of our old farm horses didn’t need somebody to ride him to haul the hay up. He would go out and when he heard the car with the hay fork, with a load on it, click on the track, he'd start swinging and come back up and turn around.

HP: Was this almost the beginning of the mechanization on farms?

DSM: It was as far as we were concerned. Well, with this exception. During the younger days of my Father and Mother mechanical binders and mechanical mowing machines came in. They could remember the time when much of the hay was cut with scythes. The grain was cut with what they called cradles, which were nothing more than scythes with some hoops or arms on them to help lay the grain over in swaths. They remembered that period.

My Mother, as a girl, used to drive what was called the self rake reaper which, when they cut

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wheat, had sweeps on it that went around. It had a platform and the cutter bar, like a cutter bar on a mowing machine, and it would cut it and the sweeps would come around and sweep it off onto the ground where the people who did the binding of the sheaves would come along and bind them by hand afterwards. By the time I arrived on the scene, we had grain binders and the first job my brother and I did in the harvesting of wheat was to gather sheaves, because our grain binder did not have a sheaf carrier on it.

Just after it was bound it was kicked off and dropped. They were dropped one by one as they went along. In order to make it easier for the men, and to speed up the operation, we gathered sheaves and laid them in a circle. We carried them in by hand so that the shockers could come along and shock them more easily.

HP: It must have been dusty work.

DSM: It wasn’t too dusty at that stage. Threshing was dusty but that kind of work wasn’t too dusty. It was prickly but before long we got a new binder with a sheaf carrier on it and with a foot trip you could carry six or eight sheaves at a time and as you came around you’d drop them in the same area so you didn’t have to have boys carrying sheaves as we used to do. Boys on a farm in those days were a very important economic asset and many, many farmers in those days had a big family of boys.

HP: If you had a hired man was he a single man; or a man with a family?

DSM: In the early days he was always a single man. He lived in the house with us, in one of the bedrooms. Then later we built a tenant house about the time I was about thirteen or fourteen. The hired man, who had worked for us when I was younger, and his wife, came to live in the tenant house as our first tenants. He had worked meantime in a stove foundry and I reckon he decided he liked farming better.

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HP: Where would you get other extra help?

DSM: We had extra help that lived up near Buckeye Lake, which was in those days the Licking Reservoir, people who did fishing: and odd jobs. We had quite a little community of what we called snake hunters. The origin of this name was not known by my generation. They were people that lived around the edge of the lake and made part of their living out of the lake. They were nearly always available for hay harvest, and for other harvest work such as working as pitchers in the field at threshing time and other odd jobs.

HP: How would you get the word to them?

DSM: When we needed them, my Father would send one of us boys up to tell them that we were ready to start work.

HP: Do you recall what they were paid?

DSM: Yes. Pay started at a $1.00 a day, and later rose to $1. 50, and finally $2.00 and $2.50 a day. We occasionally hired boys from town. I remember Dad started paying them seventy-five cents a day but he finally after a year or two got up to $1.50 for those boys. These were husky high school boys.

The cash outlay on the farm in those days was usually for buying a piece of machinery occasionally; for seasonal labor, particularly harvest labor, both for hay harvest in particular and sometimes for corn harvest including somebody to husk corn during the winter, if you didn’t have plenty of help at home. Most of the other cash outlay on the farm was for buying certain staple groceries such as coffee, sugar, tea and a few spices.

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Threshing

DSM: About two or three weeks after the wheat was harvested with the binder in the field and shocked the threshing started in the neighborhood. We had a threshing ring, following the same pattern pretty much year after year, with five or six neighbors helping each other out.

When I was about fifteen I started loading and hauling wheat to the machine from the field and this was the change from boyhood to manhood as far as farm boys were concerned. There was another lad of exactly my age who was a neighbor boy who started hauling wheat from the field at the same time.

We had a neighbor who could be very crusty when he was in the notion and he often was in the notion. He didn’t think that boys of this age could be trusted so if the wheat was a bit damp he used to stand back of the wagons and watch us to be sure that we didn’t pitch too many sheaves to clog up the machine. Usually he walked away after a while when he thought things were going all right and the minute he turned his back we loaded the machine to the point where it had to be cleaned out by hand and everybody could sit down and rest for a little while. This was the only person that we did this to. If he hadn’t been so "persnickety" about it we wouldn’t have done it to him but this was a challenge to kids of our age.

My first job at threshing was carrying water for the threshing hands, both for ourselves and for the neighbors, and I don’t think I ever got over fifty cents a day from the neighbors, when they paid me for doing such a job. A little later I used to hang sacks on the grain spouts, and some one else took them off because they were too heavy for a young lad. Threshed grain was hauled into the granaries in two-bushel sacks.

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HP: Made of what?

DSM: They were cotton sacks. The grain was stored until it was decided the price was right to sell. A two-bushel sack of wheat weighed 120 pounds, and a youngster became a full fledged threshing hand when he could shoulder a two-bushel sack of wheat by himself and walk off with it.

Corn Harvest and Storage

DSM: Harvesting corn consisted of cutting by hand with a corn knife or cutter and it was shocked in the field. As soon as we were old enough to "make a hand" we were allowed to stay out of school for a few days to help cut corn.

HP: I don’t know what shocking means.

DSM: Shocking means standing the corn up around galluses. To make galluses you take four hills of corn and bring them together, (it is green of course) and you wrap the tops in such a way that they will hold and then you use that as a frame to set the corn up around. Usually in our day a shock was made up of twelve corn hills square. Twelve hills this way and twelve hills the other.

HP: Then there was a lot of air in the middle.

DSM: There was some air in the middle. We used to chase rabbits out of corn shocks when we hunted them in the wintertime.

Corn wasn’t husked usually until after it was well matured and dried out. Consequently I did very little corn husking when I grew up because this was done during the period when we were in school. We occasionally did some husking on Saturday but

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normally the huskers husked out the corn during the week and my brother and I spent most of Saturday hauling in what had been husked out during the school week.

HP: Was it husked out on the field?

DSM: They generally husked out in the field.

HP: Did they wear gloves?

DSM: No they didn’t wear gloves; it was too bunglesome. Some of them used a husking peg that had a hook and a partial glove went over the hand and around the thumb. The hook was down at the base of the hand and they would hook into the husk, and pull it down. Most of them used a husking peg that you wore on the right hand that slipped over the fingers and had a hook much like a type of beer can opener and you just ripped it down and then husked it down.

HP: Was the corn left out in the field to dry or hauled to the barn?

DSM: We didn’t have room in the barn in those days because the barn wasn’t big enough to hold even enough hay. We stacked the hay out and left the corn in the field. A little later on about the time I was maturing and I was leaving the farm, they very often hauled it in as soon as it dried out in the shock and husked it by machine and shredded the fodder. The fodder was blown into the mows then if you had mow room, to be fed later to livestock out of the mow.

HP: Could the entire stock and leaves be used for fodder?

DSM: Cattle seldom ate the stalk but they did eat the leaves and we fed the fodder normally after they husked the corn. We bundled the fodder in bundles that could be handled easily and we hauled them in and stacked them outside the barn lot where we kept the livestock during the day and before we turned the livestock out we scattered several

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bundles of fodder for them to feed on during the day. When we shredded the fodder of course they ate more of it because it was possible for them to eat the tougher part of the stock which had been shredded up into smaller bits.

HP: Did you have a machine for doing this?

DSM: We had a machine called a "corn shredder." It really was a corn husker because that was the important part of the job, but it husked and shredded both.

HP: Were there silos? When did silos come in?

DSM: I don’t know exactly when silos came into use but we didn’t have a silo until after I left the farm at age twenty-two but we got one I’m sure quite soon after that. They came into general use I would guess some time between 1910 and 1920, and they were being widely recommended in my early days of extension work when I was at Purdue or in County Agent work in Indiana between 1916 and 1920.

HP: Many people do not understand exactly what silos are for, and if there is any reason for the construction in cylindrical shape.

DSM: Do you know how to make sauerkraut?

HP: Yes.

DSM: Well, it is the same idea as making sauerkraut. It is fermented corn and fodder. When they fill silos they cut the corn green after the ear has been pretty well matured and it is put through a silage cutter and cut up into small bits. It is run by power and blown up into the top of the silo and drops down and is packed into the silo just as you would pack cut cabbage into a kraut jar.

HP: And it is the entire corn plant?

DSM: It is the entire corn plant except the roots. They usually had a corn cutter that was drawn

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by a team and bundled it like sheaves of wheat only it was taller of course and loaded it on wagons and hauled it into the silage cutter.

HP: Is there any advantage to the fermentation?

DSM: I don’t think there was any advantage to the fermentation. It was simply a good way to store the whole plant and a mixture of corn and fodder, of course, and the fodder was green enough that once the cattle got used to it they ate the whole plant. They didn’t eat the whole plant normally when you fed the dry plant.

Silos are still in use to some extent although they aren’t as widely used as they were at one time. Just why I’m not sure. I think probably the main reason is that practically all the corn nowadays is allowed to stand in the field until it is ready to husk because it is husked by a power outfit which goes down the rows, husks the corn and carries it into wagons or trucks. The fodder is simply left in the field. But there are still a few silos that are being utilized.

The advent of more alfalfa and legume crops of that kind which helped provide green feed other than the type that we used to have which was largely timothy and clover, I think has made some difference. Of course, they use a large amount of mixed feeds now. So I assume that is partly the reason. I think probably there are more silos used by beef cattle producers now than dairy cattlemen although I have not followed the trend very closely in recent years. This is purely an inexpert opinion.

Potato Raising

DSM: My brother and I were allotted land for a potato patch of our own when we were old enough

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to look after it ourselves so that we selected the seed, cut the seed, prepared the ground, furrowed out the rows, and dropped the seed pieces by hand and covered them in part by a one-horse shovel plow or with a hand hoe. We harvested potatoes in the early days by digging with a hand hoe or a four-tined manure fork. Potato culture was not easy. However, it did give us the opportunity to earn some cash which we were interested in having and I suppose we had a potato patch of our own for four or five years before I started to college.

We usually had anywhere from a fourth of an acre up to three fourths of an acre or a whole acre for potatoes. It depended on how old we were

HP: What a lot of work!

DSM: It was a lot of work all right. My back aches yet every time I think about picking up potatoes or doing the kinds of jobs we did in those days.

Later on, of course, they perfected potato planters which brought the pieces around and dropped them about every so far apart. It was drawn by horses. They also perfected or reasonably perfected at least, a potato digger which was nothing more than a very wide moleboard plow with a shaker on the back which rode in under the potatoes, soil and all, and then the shaker would flip up and down and flip the soil out and leave the potatoes free so they could be picked up in baskets or crates.

HP: It was sort of a screen?

DSM: That’s right. The bars were close enough together that the potatoes didn’t fall through. But we weren’t lucky enough to have that kind of an operation when we were having our own potato patch.

The first real money that I earned in this manner I spent for a Remington shot gun, which I still have. I don’t suppose I ever bought anything that I got more pleasure out of as a kid then I did that.

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HP: How old were you?

DSM: I was fourteen; the same year I started to high school. One of the good merchants in the town allowed a friend of mine, Nick Embrey, and me to go to Columbus with a order from him to the wholesale house there to sell us a shotgun at wholesale. So Nick bought a Winchester and I bought a Remington.

Butchering and Meat Preparation

DSM: One farm task that was always considered to be fun was the butchering of the year’s meat supply during the winter. It was fun because we were allowed to stay out of school for the day, and there was always a gathering of certain neighbors and relatives which made it sort of a social occasion.

From the shooting and bleeding of the hogs, including the scraping, through the rendering of the lard and the making of the sausage, it was an exciting day for us. One of my uncles always helped us butcher because he was very expert. He was also a good shot. I felt that I was beginning to grow up when one morning he asked me if I wouldn’t like to shoot the hogs which I did, and I thought I was a big guy. It was our own family meat supply. We usually butchered four or five hogs.

HP: That was a winter’s supply?

DSM: That was a winter’s supply; some of it usually lasted into the summer. Most of the meat was cured and smoked so it would last into the following summer if needed.

HP: Did you have your own smoke house?

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DSM: We had our own smoke house. We smoked with hickory wood. We cured the meat the hams, the shoulders, the sides which were rubbed with a mixture of brown sugar, salt, pepper and saltpeter before it was smoked and was allowed to "cure" for a time. Then it was hung in the smoke house and smoked for several days. I don’t remember for just how long. Then we bagged it in heavy paper bags and tied it up and hung it in the smoke house until it was used.

HP: Was the fire kept constantly during those days of smoking?

DSM: Yes.

HP: A very low fire?

DSM: A very low fire was maintained so that there was smoke instead of blaze. I suppose occasionally it would go out during the night and was rekindled again the next morning. I remember how it smelled and seeing the smoke coming out from under the rafters of the old smoke house when we had a good smoke going.

HP: Would you save hickory logs for this purpose?

DSM: No, we saved hickory pieces for smoking our meat. You don’t use much wood when you smoke meat. Little pieces of hickory that aren’t very big much like kindling wood only a little larger than kindling normally were used and we had plenty of hickory in those days. When a hickory tree was cut we would take the chips and small pieces that were left and use it for smoking meats.

HP: Was the smoke house a brick building?

DSM: No it wasn’t a brick building. The smoke house on our farm was the oldest building on the place. It was a frame building, built of logs with black walnut siding and it was never painted until after I graduated from college and had left home.

Dad finally decided that it ought to be painted to make it match up with the other

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buildings. We regretted it because we kind of liked it the way it was. But that siding had been on there, I suppose, for a hundred and fifty years or more and it was getting thinner each year because it was very dry of course and would flake off a bit. The old smoke house is still there. It will probably stay there unless it burns down.

HP: Then it is hundred and fifty years old at least; it must be a considerable fire hazard.

DSM: That’s right; it probably is one hundred fifty years old. There isn’t much of a fire hazard if you are careful.

HP: Was it a low fire?

DSM: Low fire, and we used one of these big iron kettles and set it in a barrel. The kettle was filled with sawdust to near the top. We were very careful to keep the fire in the middle and not to lay the hickory sticks so that any pieces would drop off when they burned down to the point where they might be heavier on the outside. So it never occurred to us that we might have a fire in the smoke house. I suppose people did.

HP: How many hams and shoulders of pork were there for a winter’s supply?

DSM: Well, when we killed five hogs, which we very often did, there were ten hams and ten shoulders, which would be twenty, plus ten pieces of side meat which would be a total of thirty. Those were the pieces that were smoked after curing.

HP: What about bacon?

DSM: The side meat was used as bacon. We occasionally used the fattest part for cooking with beans on wash day but we also sliced it for fried bacon.

Spare ribs were eaten very soon after butchering because they were fresh and there was a general understanding among the neighbors that when we

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butchered they would get some sausage and spare ribs and whatever it was that was available that we thought they might like of the fresh meats; and the same thing happened when they butchered.

We didn’t butcher the same day as our neighbors so we had a lot of fresh meat at various times during the winter: fresh sausage, fresh spare ribs, and occasional tenderloin. The neighbors didn’t give us the tenderloins; we saved out the tenderloins for use by ourselves.

HP: Was all sausage smoked?

DSM: We never smoked sausage. Some people do smoke sausage but we never did. What we did was to use quite a bit of it soon after butchering and the rest of it was fried down. This simply meant that it was partially cooked and put into a large five or ten gallon jar, twined around if it was cased sausage that was the only kind we fried down, and then you poured hot lard over it until it was completely covered.

HP: That was a preservative?

DSM: That’s right. If you would have looked into the top of that jar you would have thought, if you didn’t know better, that it was only a jar of lard. The jar was a five or ten gallon crock usually white on the outside and dark on the inside. It could be done, of course, in a smaller crock or jar but usually when we fried down we did it in a big jar.

HP: The lard was used for shortening?

DSM: The lard was used for shortening. In the old days lard was about the only shortening that was used. We sold a lot of lard as we began to have cottagers nearby and others who were interested in buying butter, eggs, lard, etc.

We sold it in little wooden boats and weighed it out by the pound. I used to work for my uncle and aunt in a general store part of the time. We

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used to sell it in the store. Nowadays lard is less often used, but it is still available. When hogs are slaughtered there is some lard, but most of the hogs nowadays are not the lard type that we had in the old days. Fat hogs were a good commodity and were in demand back in the early 1900’s.

HP: Lean hogs have more meat...

DSM: That’s right; bacon type hogs have a larger proportion of lean meat.

HP: How long would a jar of sausage and lard keep? Would it keep until spring?

DSM: Oh, yes. That was the whole idea. Usually we didn’t start using the fried down sausage until toward spring and normally we didn’t finish it off until early summer.

HP: But it wouldn’t keep over for another year?

DSM: Well, I suppose it would. If we had kept it during hot weather the lard would have had a tendency to melt. You wouldn’t have had as good protection for the sausage as you would during the winter season. We always kept it in a cool place.

The Catfish Ceremony

DSM: One other little item that we, my brother and I, have always looked back upon that happened on butchering day was the frying of what we called the "catfish." My Uncle Zane Seymour, who helped us butcher, would come around about the middle of the afternoon after they had started rendering the lard and the fires were up and the lard was hot. He would whisper in our ears in a very secretive manner, wanting to know if we didn’t think it was

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about time for a "catfish". Of course we would jump up and down and say yes. We always slipped around slyly. He would take a knife and go cut a strip of tenderloin about the size of a small cat fish for each of us and we would just drop it into the hot lard. It would sear immediately. We would leave it there a little while until it was cooked through and then we would fish it out with a long handled ladle.

By that time we had a hand full of salt and as soon as it was cool enough we ate the "catfish" and I have never tasted anything that tasted any better than that "catfish". It was something that we always looked forward to because it was our secret. Of course everybody knew what we were doing, but we thought it was a secret.

HP: I’m afraid I still haven’t gotten the complete picture on the butchering: where it took place, whether the women took part in it -- the flavor of the whole thing.

DSM: Oh yes, the women, everybody worked at butchering time. The family who lived nearby who had only an acre or two of land themselves helped the Roby family. Mr. and Mrs. Roby and one of the two grown sons always helped butcher. I have already mentioned my uncle Zane Seymour who always came down to help us butcher.

We were always allowed to stay home from school to help butcher. And then, of course, we usually in those days had a "hired girl" who was usually one of the Roby girls. Mother, of course, helped; everybody worked.

The first thing that happened in the morning was the starting of the fires and heating up water for dousing or scalding the hogs after they were killed so as to make the scraping of the hair easier. This was out-of-doors. The kettles were set between two logs on heavy iron rings with legs that were made by a blacksmith. The platform that was used to draw the hogs up on to after they were killed was the farm sled with boards put across it

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lengthwise. Next to this were one or two barrels which were set so that they slanted toward the sled. As soon as the hogs were shot and bled by our neighbor Mr. Roby who was good at it, taking a butcher knife and cutting the jugular vein, they were dragged by a hook which was fitted into the back of the jaw, to pull them up onto the sled.

Then the boiling water was poured into the barrel or barrels and the hogs were then doused up and down in the barrel until tests around the legs showed whether the hair would come off easily, and when it did, they turned the hog around and doused the other end, then pulled them out. The hair was then scraped off either with knives or scrapers that were made for the purpose.

HP: Was anything in the hot water?

DSM: Just hot water was used generally, but wood ashes were sometimes added.

HP: Was any use made of the hog bristles?

DSM: No. The bristles were lost as far as the farm was concerned. In the packing houses, of course, they were saved. They used to say they used everything but the squeal in the slaughter houses.

HP: A hog weighs about half a ton, doesn’t it?

DSM: No, not that much. Normally the hogs we butchered would weigh anywhere from 200 to 250 or 300 pounds. The market size of hogs in those days was around 250 pounds normally. If it was fat or if you butchered an old hog which they occasionally did, we sometimes had one that would weigh up to 600-700 pounds. You usually sold the old hogs to somebody else to eat. They were a little tough.

HP: Were the women in on this phase of the butchering?

DSM: In the meantime the women were busy in what we called the wood house, where tables were set up with planks, boiling water ready to do a number of things including having the instruments cleaned up. As soon as

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the hogs were scraped, they were hung on a scaffolding beside the hen house with one end next to the building and at the other end two posts were set up crisscross with a log chain around it to hold the scaffolding with a heavy post running across between the two. They were hung on what they called gambles, which were stuck through the leg right near the bend in the knee or the hock. They were held up by a couple of men and the gamble put over the top of the scaffold and slipped through the other leg so that they hung there to cool out.

HP: All five hogs in a row?

DSM: Yes.

HP: The scaffolding was put up just for this purpose, a temporary affair?

DSM: Yes, Just for this purpose.

HP: It had to be very strong; my word, the preparation that went into butchering!

DSM: Yes, but of course it was a normal thing to prepare for butchering day; you didn’t think much about it. It didn’t take too much time.

As soon as the hogs were cooled out a bit they were cut up into various cuts: the hams, the shoulders, the sides, and the sausage meat were trimmed out. The major part of the lard came off the tops of the hams and the shoulders and around the loin and the top of the side meat, plus the leaf lard from inside the ribs.

HP: Let me be sure I understand. The hog has been killed and eviscerated and the bristle has been scraped off the skin and then the rest of him is still there; the whole hog.

DSM: The rest of him is still there. Usually after the carcass had been hung, one of the first things they did was to cut off the head. It was trimmed out

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and the snout was taken out and the rest of it cooked to make mincemeat. Grandmother also liked souse so the ears were also cooked sometimes. That was one of the first things that were done after the hogs were hung. Then after they were cooled out they were moved back onto the sled, which had been washed down thoroughly, and that’s where the cutting up, that is the major cutting up, was done. As soon as the cutting was well under way the women and the boys and anybody else who wasn’t too busy began to cut lard. It was cut into little chunks about an inch or inch-and-a-half each way.

HP: Had the hogs been skinned, or was the skin part of the lard?

DSM: We usually didn’t put the skin in with the lard, although it could be done that way. Sometimes the lard had the skin on it and that’s one of the things that made cracklings. But there was also cracklings from lard that was skinned, too, because all you got out of it was the fat. The fibers that holds the fat together is still there. So the lard cutting was quite a job.

Cleaning of the entrails for sausage casings was started as soon as the hogs were cut up, and this was usually done by one or two of the ladies in the wood house away from the cold. They had a stove in there and it was possible to have enough heat to keep reasonably warm.

HP: I had forgotten that there weren’t synthetic sausage casings.

DSM: No, there weren’t synthetic casings. These sausage casings were prepared and ready. In addition to cutting up lard the parts that were to be used for sausage which was the scrappy parts of the meat that had mostly lean meat in it were cut up into pieces which went into the sausage grinder. Sausage grinding started as soon as there was anybody to turn the sausage grinder which was usually one of the jobs that we did as kids.

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HP: Was it like a food chopper?

DSM: That’s right. They were the same as food grinders nowadays, manually operated. The sausage was stuffed by the same machine that was used for pressing lard. When you pressed lard you ran it out hot into jars in liquid form from a spout and then when it was cooled it was just good white lard. When you got ready to stuff sausage the same machine was used only you took out the sort of strainer we had inside the machine for lard. We pressed the ground-up sausage and it came out through a spout into the entrail casings which had been attached to the spout.

HP: Is there anything inside the hog that is shaped like a sausage casing, or how did they get it into that cylindrical shape?

DSM: They simply used some of the intestines or entrails which were the proper size for this type of operation.

HP: Then it wasn’t a matter of sewing it, or anything?

DSM: No, it was Just a matter of scraping them and cleaning them thoroughly and then put in salt water in a little pan or jar until ready for use. They were clean and edible by that time.

HP: Was the sausage seasoned?

DSM: The sausage was mixed and seasoned as soon as it was ground.

HP: Did they put filler in with it?

DSM: No.

HP: No bread crumbs?

DSM: No, we didn’t put in anything but meat, salt, pepper and a little sage usually. It depended on what people liked. We didn’t put onion in it.

HP: Was your Mother in charge of this?

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DSM: Well, yes and no. Mrs. Roby, the neighbor, was in charge of the cleaning of the sausage casings and she also usually officiated at the stuffing because she knew exactly what to do when once in a while one would be cut and she would see it coming up and it would start shooting out at the side and she would grab it and the sausage that didn’t get into the casing would be put back through in the next run. She would cut the casing at that stage and start over.

HP: Did you eat sausage for breakfast?

DSM: Sausage was used for almost any meal, but breakfast was more normal. In those days on the farm you had meat of some kind almost every morning for breakfast especially during the winter. Cereal hadn’t come into general use in our household as yet. Although we did have oatmeal and we had a lot of buckwheat cakes and pancakes and fried mush and that sort of thing during the winter. But we usually had sausage or bacon or even steak occasionally for breakfast.

HP: And eggs, I suppose.

DSM: Oh yes, eggs were in common use.

HP: Did you keep chickens?

DSM: Oh yes. Don’t you remember I told you my first job was gathering eggs?

HP: All the butchering was done outside the house; nothing was brought into the house until the finished product was ready.

DSM: That’s right. In our case this was true but I’m not sure that was true in every case. Our kitchen was small. Some places had large kitchens and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of this processing of the sausage and so on wasn’t done in the kitchen but not in our case. We used what we called the wood house for that.

HP: It’s simply amazing how self-sustaining the farm was when you were young. Outside of coffee, sugar - what else did you buy?

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DSM: Well, there were certain seasonings. We could grow sage and occasionally did, but we usually bought a little sage and that sort of thing for seasoning. Coffee, tea and sugar were the major staples that we bought.

We tried to raise enough vegetables for use during the summer and for canning for use during the winter. Most vegetables in my early days were not so easy to can, because they hadn’t developed the cold pack method yet and some of them spoiled. We always put up tomatoes, and of course fruits like peaches, apples and jellies and such. But it is true that some farms were almost completely self-sustaining.

We did buy our own brooms although I knew farmers and some of our relatives whom I mentioned earlier who lived in the north part of the county, grew their own broom corn and made their own brooms in an off season.

Getting back to butchering, I might add that we usually laid out planks on chunks of wood in our basement where the hams and the shoulders and the side meats were placed until they were rubbed with a combination of salt, sugar, saltpeter and pepper that I mentioned, before smoking. We used the basement because it was cooler down there than it was in some of the other areas.

HP: Was this before or after the smoking?

DSM: Before -- right after the butchering. They started rubbing the meat with that combination of salt etc. within a few days after butchering, then we smoked it all at one time.

We had long stringers or beams that ran about two feet apart across the smoke house, the full length, with sharp hooks on them, so you could just hook the meat up there directly, or you could tie it with twine string and hook it up there. It got a little drippy sometimes if your fire got too hot.

There were two seasonal jobs which I enjoyed very much. Butchering in winter and threshing in

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the summer. Part of the enjoyment came from the social contacts from these group activities and they were also feast days.

Off -Season Work

DSM: One of the most onerous tasks which we indulged in in those days was the cutting and storing ice during the winter. We had our own ice house which we filled by cutting ice on Buckeye Lake and hauling it a mile or more to pack it in sawdust in the ice house.

The main hotel at Buckeye Lake have a very large ice house to provide their supply of ice during the summer months, and at age fourteen I worked with a crew for most of two weeks during the holiday season harvesting ice. It was hard, wet, cold work, but I wanted a new suit of long trousers for school wear, so I stayed with it and I was able to buy the suit for $14.00.

Other off-season jobs on the farm were the various jobs that were carried on when the main crops were not being planted or harvested. In the summer after harvest was over there was always the job of mowing fence rows and open ditch banks with a scythe. When I got to be old enough I had this full job because I was the only one in the family that didn’t poison from poison ivy. I had a week or ten days job of working all alone around the fence rows and up and down the open ditches.

HP: What is a fence row?

DSM: A fence row in those days was largely rows along the old rail fences where there was a lot of space taken up that could not be cultivated. They were sometimes called worm fences. Along the wire fences there were fence rows also, because you could only

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get up about so close to a fence with a team when you were cultivating or plowing, so that there was always a strip on either side at least three feet wide.

HP: Is this waste space that has to be mowed?

DSM: That’s right. It had to be mowed if you wanted to keep the weeds under control. They were usually mowed in August after harvest and threshing.

During my teenage period, in particular, we hauled a great deal of gravel during the off-season, because at that time we were beginning to use a lot of concrete. We made concrete drinking troughs for the animals; we put in concrete walks; we built a big wide concrete veranda, half way round the house.

HP: You did this yourself?

DSM: That’s right. When we built the new barn we built a bank barn and it had a concrete wall on one side and both ends. The basement was concreted throughout. This was an off season job of concrete work normally. Not only of hauling the gravel but of mixing cement and aggregate by turning it with shovels and then taking it from the mixing board to the place where you wanted it in a wheelbarrow and dumping it and leveling it or pocking it inside of forms.

Some of the other jobs, off-season jobs, had to do with clipping wheat stubble, with a mowing machine, in order to keep down the ragweed and other weeds that would grow up after the harvest, clipping pastures if there were too many weeds in the pasture.

On rainy days, of course, we very often oiled and mended harness, in the wintertime we put up ice, and in the fall we made cider, and in the late summer in addition to the other out-of-season chores, we usually hauled manure out of the barn lots that had accumulated from the feeding operations during the seasons when the cattle and the

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horses were not out on pasture. There was always the job of building or rebuilding and repairing of fences.

Community Road Repairing

DSM: We also usually had a period when we were hauling crushed stone for the road.

We prided ourselves on having one of the best roads in the county, before hard surface roads came in. The grading was done by the neighbors who used their teams. and a township grader which was supplied. The township usually agreed to provide the crushed limestone. We didn’t have enough gravel right close by. We and the neighbors would haul it and put it on the road; so we had a period of hauling road stone nearly every year until we got the road really built up to the place where it was quite a good road for that day before the automobile came in.

HP: Did you do road work only in front of your own land?

DSM: Oh no, a group of neighbors worked the whole strip of the road all the way from the national pike out beyond our place up to what later became Buckeye Lake Park which was better than two miles. There wasn’t any question raised. We worked the whole strip. We would do a strip each year and the next year we would pick up right there and go on to the next strip. We didn’t get it all done the same year.

HP: Who was in charge? Who told you what to do?

DSM: Usually the township trustee was responsible.

HP: Did he come out and actually oversee your work?

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DSM: I don’t remember of ever seeing a township trustee. They supplied the stone and the grader and somebody went and got it, and we did the work.

HP: Who gave the orders? Who told you what to do?

DSM: Well, we knew what to do. I don’t know who was boss,

HP: Was this considered a form of government taxation? It was a very democratic thing to do.

DSM: I suppose some of the older men in the group like my Dad or John Neel, the old neighbor I mentioned awhile ago, maybe took over. I just don’t know.

HP: What if one of the neighbors had said "I’m not going to work on the road this year."?

DSM: It never occurred to anybody to say that they couldn’t help. Anybody who lived on the farm in that area, worked on the road. The people who usually served as day workers and whom I called the snake hunters didn’t work on the road. They didn’t have teams and they weren’t a part of this neighborhood operation.

HP: It was a prestige thing then, wasn’t it?

DSM: It was just accepted. It was a cooperative thing that was accepted, and I have never thought of the questions that you have just raised. Somebody I suppose raised the question whether it wasn’t time to tell the Trustees to get some stone in and we started hauling stone.

We had what we called gravel beds for the wagons which simply meant that there were several flats about five or six inches wide that you fitted in with side boards and you unloaded the stone then by lifting the side boards and then slat by slat and dumping it right in the middle of the road or wherever you wanted to dump it.

HP: It really was a form of self government.

DSM: That’s right.

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HP: And apparently very democratically run.

DSM: Yes, it worked out very well.

HP: With a certain status to it that the people who weren’t property owners were not expected to participate.

DSM: Even if they owned property if they weren’t farmers- there were a few people who had a acre or two but they didn’t have teams, they didn’t have equipment. The Robys were neighbors.

HP: You mentioned your neighbors the Robys. They had only an acre or so, you say?

DSM: Yes.

HP: Tell me about them.

DSM: Well, it happened that Mrs. Roby was a cousin of my Dad´s. They had a family of about seven or eight youngsters. He was a Civil War veteran and a very good handyman and we looked to the Robys for all kinds of jobs throughout the year when we required extra help. They were harvest hands, they were butchering hands, they occasionally helped out in other jobs when we needed occasional extra help and in the meantime they worked their own acre or two; raised potatoes, raised vegetables and of course canned them and were pretty self sufficient.

The girls as they grew up worked out as hired girls. We had three different Roby girls work for us while I was a youngster. As one of them got married another one came on and worked for us.

HP: They obviously had a somewhat subordinate position in the community and I wonder why? Was it limited intelligence or was it physical strength? As a Civil War veteran he must have been pretty well advanced in age.

DSM: No, it wasn’t physical strength. They were as strong as most men.

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HP: Were they the kind of people who were successful?

DSM: Well, the Robys were accepted like anybody else in the community in local affairs such as school socials and that sort of thing if they wanted to participate. But they were not thought of in terms of leadership.

The Roby kids and we grew up together.

HP: Did you date the Roby girls?

DSM: No, I never dated them and most of them were older. There were only two who were our age. We used to go hunting every time we could get off during the winter with a Roby boy that was my brother s age, a little older than I. Most of the family was older and some of them were already married and had left home by the time I came along.

But they were sort of a self sufficient family. They had one horse, which was enough to do their plowing with a small plow and their cultivating on the small acreage that they had. If they needed a team they occasionally borrowed a team from us.

HP: I’m just trying to guess the sociological grouping in your community. They seemed to occupy a subordinate position and I wonder why?

DSM: Well, I don’t think they were considered subordinate in most senses, Helen. It seemed that they participated only as hired hands in such things as threshing, harvesting, butchering and so on because they didn’t trade work. They couldn’t reciprocate.

The same thing is true about hauling stone on the road because they were not equipped. Come to think of it I think they used to help do some leveling with shovels once the stone was dumped.

HP: A voluntary or paid contribution?

DSM: A paid contribution. I don’t think most of the people of that type did contribute to road work.

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People up around the lake I don’t think did. It is a little hard to explain what the difference was because they were accepted as playmates, they were accepted if they wanted to be in the social activities, but for the most part they usually didn’t go to church which was one of the social activities.

HP: Could it have been a lack of proper clothes that kept them from church?

DSM: I don’t think so. As a matter of fact I think as the girls and men grew older they did occasionally go to church but I don’t think the older folks went to church much. Mrs. Roby went occasionally. It wasn’t that they were complete heathens in the sense that we thought of heathens.

HP: Did they ever come over to meals at your house? Special dinner or anything like that?

DSM: No. We always went to Grandmother Seymour’s for Christmas when I was young. Either to Grandmother’s or one of the aunts. Later on, of course, we had it at our house with our own family, our immediate family.

HP: There just wasn’t much of a social relationship with the Robys.

DSM: Well, not in that sense, no. We thought very highly of the Roby girls who had worked for us and one of them was still living until recently. She was in the early eighties. She took care of my Mother after her own husband died several years ago and Mother got to the place where she needed somebody to help her out.

She took care of Mother’s household until she broke a hip. I never went back home that I didn’t go to see her and chitchat with her because we thought of her as practically a member of the family; she helped raise us.

HP: You have no idea what they were paid as hired girls?

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DSM: No, they weren’t paid much I assure you.

HP: Perhaps something like $3.00 a week.

DSM: I think that’s probably right, and at that time I don’t think they got more than $3. 00 or $4.00 or $5.00 a week at the outside. They got their board and their room of course. Later on when she came to take care of Mother in recent years she got $35.00 a week and her board and room, so the times have changed pretty drastically.

HP: Your family was certainly one of the leading families in the community.

DSM: Yes. This was always hard for me to believe, Helen. I remember some of the kids from what we called the snake hunter group used to tell me how rich we were and I knew that we were in debt and had been in debt for years. We were paying off some money that had been borrowed during Grandmother Myer’s day after Grandfather died. She wasn’t too good a manager. We always had patches on our pants but that didn’t seem to make any difference.

As far as these kids were concerned we lived in the big house. They thought that we had lots of money, I presume, compared with them, but I didn’t think we had any money because I wasn’t getting any of it unless I raised a patch of potatoes. This I’m sure, as I look back, was the general feeling of kids of that category: that we were some of the elite, the outstanding well-to-do citizens. We weren’t too well-to-do but nevertheless we did own 135 acres of land and we had buildings to go with them.

Finally we had a new barn, and other improvements. Later on as we began to rent some of the land for cottage lots things began to get better but we never made a lot of money farming so we never had much cash.

HP: There were so many other things besides cash.

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DSM: Oh sure. If there hadn’t been more than cash it would have been terrible. There was plenty of food and many homely pleasures.

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CHAPTER III

PLEASURE AND RECREATION

DSM: Farm boys had to have some pleasure and recreation as well as hard work. Some of the things that we got pleasure from was the owning and rearing of pets. I remember that we had one or two pet lambs which grew into sizable sheep which were ultimately sold and there were tears when they went off to the market.

At one stage when I was a youngster, we had a pet gosling. One day when the family was away my brother and I decided to have a parade he led the lamb and I led the gosling. I put a string around his neck and by the time they came home the gosling was beyond recall. I had choked him to death.

We occasionally had a pet pig, a runt pig, that needed a little extra attention. I remember one that our hired man called "Toby" for some reason or other. I don’t know where he got the idea. This pig was smart enough so that every time the cows were milked and the milk was brought in, he used to come in to the yard through a little hole in the bottom of the gate where one picket had been broken off where he could just get through. We would put out a pan of milk for him and he would drink so much that he couldn’t get back out between the pickets so he would go off and lie down by a little cherry tree nearby until he had shrunk back to the size where he could get back through the hole. He knew enough to know that he couldn’t do it and he learned enough to know all he had to do was wait and he would shrink back to normal size.

At Easter time or previous to Easter time it was a great game to hide eggs and to brag about how many dozen you had hidden. I’m sure that the

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eggs were never very good quality by the time they were retrieved. Very often it was cold enough that if we hadn’t hidden them in a warm place they would freeze.

HP: They were colored eggs?

DSM: No, these were eggs that we had gathered. I should say that we stole from the family and hid them in boxes. Everybody expected it. We used boxes or anything that you could find. We would tuck them away in the hay mow or any good hiding place.

HP: Were they boiled?

DSM: No. They were fresh eggs at the time they were hidden and then they were brought in on Easter morning to count out to see who had hidden the most eggs. Kids around the whole neighborhood used to brag about how many they had hidden. Of course it was a game to get away with it because Mother and Dad weren’t too happy to have their eggs hidden.

Then we colored some eggs but not very many. It was great business to brag about how many eggs you ate on Easter morning. I don’t remember what my record is but I did pretty well.

HP: You mean cooked for breakfast?

DSM: Cooked for breakfast, that’s right.

HP: Not hard boiled.

DSM: If you liked them hard boiled they could be hard boiled, but usually they were soft boiled or fried. Any way that you liked them.

HP: How many eggs would you eat? Half dozen or something like that?

DSM: I probably ate six or eight. Farm kids could get away with six or eight eggs without too much trouble.

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Memories of Visits to Grandmother Seymour

DSM: Memories that stand out are the holiday visits to my Grandmother Seymour’s. Usually we went there on Thanksgiving and Christmas and my brother and I usually went to stay with them for two weeks during the summer when we were younger, when we weren’t yet making a full hand at home.

HP: Tell me about the Seymour household. Where it was and exactly what it was like and so on.

DSM: Well. The Seymour household was five miles away on one route and on another route it was seven miles from our place. It was up a long lane off the Lancaster road and near the National Pike (Route 40). The road ran from Luray, about two miles from Hebron. Hebron, of course, is quite a metropolis compared to Luray. Hebron has 800 and I think Luray had about 50.

HP: Then or now?

DSM: Still. They haven t changed much.

They, the Seymours, had settled on this land back in the 1850´s about the time they were married. First they went to Indiana and settled in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, near Lafayette for a short time and then came back to Ohio and built a log house.

The old log house was still standing when I used to go up there as a kid. The roof had partly fallen in. They kept some livestock back there and the logs were still good.

The older kids were born in the log house but I think maybe they had built the other one before my Mother came along.

The house wasn’t too big. They had what they called a summer kitchen that was attached to the house by a porch. I can smell it yet, it smelled good. It always smelled good.

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HP: What was a summer kitchen?

DSM: In the wintertime they set their cook stove up in the same room that they used for a dining room the year around. They cooked in there and they served in there. But during the summer they cooked in the summer kitchen where they had a big stove. They had all the kitchen equipment that they needed there and the food was carried through the porch into the dining room to be served.

HP: It was to keep the heat out of the house.

DSM: I suppose. I don’t know why.

HP: Were they both coal ranges or wood?

DSM: They were wood ranges, in those days.

HP: They had stoves in both places.

DSM: Oh yes, or they could very easily move it, you know. In the summer time they moved the stove out of the dining room to make more room if nothing else. They may have moved it back and forth. I’m not sure about that. They had a good sized range I remember in the summer kitchen which wasn’t too easy to move and I think maybe they simply stored the other one temporarily.

We had great times there at Grandmother Seymour’s. We always had presents at Christmas time. They were not very costly presents. The whole family gathered in for the picking of the Christmas tree. My Grandmother had a family of seven at that stage. Incidentally all of the seven with one exception lived to be 82 years old or older. The one that lived to be the oldest was an aunt of mine who lived with my Mother for a number of years before she died at age 102.

HP: How old was your Mother when she died?

DSM: My Mother died at 94. She would have been 95 in two more months. My Aunt Alice, who was one of my favorite people, died at the age of 52 with cancer

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of the lung. All the rest lived to more than eighty-two years of age.

Thanksgiving was quite a day but it didn’t have presents, of course, as you had at Christmas.

The Seymours were farmers just the same as the Myer family was and I assume had about the same standing in the community. Some of the Seymours were quite active Methodists as my Dad and my Mother were. My Aunt Mate, for example, who lived to the ripe old age of 102, always sang in the choir when I was a kid. She had a good alto voice.

HP: What is the name Mate a nickname for?

DSM: Mary.

A Country Quartet

DSM: My Uncle George was a. good tenor. There was a quartet in the community of which he was a member as a young man. They sang all the popular songs of the day. The quartet type of songs such as "Where Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone?", and also some songs that were much more serious than that. They always threw in one of this kind because people just loved it--"With his tail cut short and his hair cut long" and so on.

It used to be fun to watch that quartet. A chap by the name of Mac Brown was the base, Alf Parish was second tenor, Sam Rosebraugh was baritone. Sam Rosebraugh was always losing the place. You could always see them pointing a finger when they realized that Sam was lost. One time I’ve forgotten what they were singing but Sam sang "Where, Oh where is the place" and one of them sang "I’ll be damned if I know."

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HP: This was in front of a crowd?

DSM: That’s right. Of course it was a group of people that knew what they were doing. They sang at funerals, they sang at all kinds of affairs. Three of them were farmers and Sam Rosebraugh was a harness maker in Hebron. They started singing when they were kids. Uncle George was a member, the tenor. He is one of the Seymours that lived to be 92.

As I said earlier, my brother and I used to go up there for two weeks every summer which we thoroughly enjoyed.

We helped out with the chores and if there was anything to do, such as hauling gravel and that sort of thing, we went along and helped to load gravel in the off season. We helped with the harvest. I have a finger that is badly mangled because I tried to help a horse pull up some hay and got my finger into the pulley and the rope peeled it off. My uncle and aunt took me to the doctor at Hebron four miles away by horse and buggy.

We also did some shooting, and hunting. Shooting the blackbirds to keep them out of the cornfield if it was that time of the year was fun for us.

I remember quite distinctly one of my great frustrations. After I had been at Grandmother’s about a week one summer we went to church on Sunday night, which was not unusual. My Aunt Mate drove us and my brother and I went along. Of course, my parents were there. As we came out of the church my Mother put her arm around my shoulders as we walked out to the buggy and she said "We’re going to thresh this week, don’t you want to come home with us?" She didn’t realize that this was a rather cruel thing to do. I didn’t want to go home but I didn’t want to miss threshing and I wept tears that went clear to my toes. I suppose I wept the most of the way back to Grandmother’s but I decided to stay that extra week. It was the kind of decisions kids have to

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make once in a while that are kind of tough. I think this indicated how well I liked my Grandmother, She was a great person.

Grandfather Seymour had died in 1890, the year before I was born, so Grandmother had been a widow for a number of years.

Grandmother Seymour continued to run the farm with the help of her boys, and she had three at home at that time. They did the heavy farm work. She was a good farm hand herself. She did the milking usually and she did a lot of other chores. When the old cat had kittens and she had too many around she was the one who took the kittens in the coal bucket to the creek.

HP: What did she look like, Dillon?

DSM: She wasn’t a very big woman. She was spare, wiry and gray hair almost ever since I could remember. White hair, of course, by the time she passed away at age 85. She had a wonderful smile.

HP: Was she a good cook?

DSM: Oh, wonderful. Just superb. I suppose it was one reason why we liked to go up there because I told Mother she did things better than she did. I said I liked Grandmother’s cookies better than Mother’s and Mother used to get so mad because she said "I make them exactly like she does." She did I’m sure, but there was something about the aura of Grandmother’s kitchen and cookies that made me like them better.

Marooned by a Storm

DSM: One other incident that I’m reminded of is a scary one. During the summer, as I have mentioned,

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my brother and I usually spent two weeks at our Grandmother’s. My Aunt Mate who was still a bachelor lady usually looked after us and if she went any place she took us with her. One day we went to Newark to do some shopping which was a distance of eleven or twelve miles.

We got near home after dark and a big storm had come up. The storm had blown a large tree down across the road which was just across the fields from my Grandmother’s house but this was probably half a mile or more away.

We were in a dilemma because my brother and I were afraid to go for help and Aunt Mate didn’t dare leave us with a skittish horse to go for help so all she could do was to wait and yell for help.

During this wait she called for her brothers. We saw them come out to the barn with a lantern, hitch up a horse to a cart, and drive out the lane which was not too far from where we were and they went in the other direction to Millersport, a town probably three and a half miles away. I don’t know whether they went to the barbershop or did some shopping. It was only when they came back from Millersport that they finally heard my aunt call and two of my uncles came down and helped to roll the tree off the road so we could pass.

HP: How long were you marooned there?

DSM: I think we must have been marooned there about three and a half hours.

HP: Did you have anything to eat?

DSM: Well, I don’t remember about that. I suppose we had had something to eat. We probably had some candy and that sort of thing with us but I don’t remember about it. We were too scared to remember very much.

HP: Was it raining?

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DSM: No it wasn’t raining at that time. It was windy and it had rained but at that time it wasn’t raining but of course, we had a little phaeton with side curtains on it.

Going back to Christmas time for a moment, some of the simple pleasures were having popcorn balls, strings of popcorn which were used to decorate the tree in those days and you could eat it off by having one kid at one end and another at the other end and see who got to the middle first. All such simple pleasures as that. If you got an orange in the bottom of your stocking on Christmas morning you really had something that you treasured. Nowadays, of course, kids don’t realize that oranges were scarce back there.

HP: I suppose they would have to go to town and buy oranges at Christmas time.

DSM: Oh yes, they bought oranges. The storekeeper got them in at Christmas time. It was about the only time they ever had them. Once in a while they got a bunch of bananas out of season but not very often. But oranges were something special at Christmas.

HP: What were other Christmas gifts? Something knitted?

DSM: Occasionally you got something knitted but a pair of skates was really something and books that kids could read. Knitted mittens were very common but I don’t remember that we had home knitted socks because Mother didn’t do that kind of knitting and Grandmother didn’t either. She didn’t have time.

Candies and an orange beside one major present was about what we had at home. Then we always had some small gifts at Grandmother’s and gifts from the aunts. Once in a while we would get something as big as a sled.

HP: They lived close enough that you could go up just for the day on Christmas?

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DSM: That’s right. We would go up to Grandmother Seymour’s as soon as the chores were done in the morning and come back in time to do the chores in the evening. Which meant that we usually got there about 10:00 or 10:30 and left by 4:00 or 4:30.

HP: The chores must have been the nagging thing about life on a farm. That you couldn’t leave the animals whether you felt like it or not.

DSM: You re telling me. The chores that I had to do were not only feeding but also the milking. As I got old enough to have dates and to be away on Sundays I always had to get home and help milk on Sunday evening and my brother didn’t need to because he didn’t milk. It used to irk me no end. But we did it. We milked every morning and milked every evening.

Plans To Become A Farmer

HP: That well may have been a factor in your not wanting to be a farmer.

DSM: No. In spite of monotonous chores I wanted to be a farmer. As a matter of fact I had planned to be a farmer. I had bought a farm just before the war broke out in 1917 and I had planned to farm but by the time I got ready to farm I wasn’t married and I didn’t think anybody who doesn’t have a wife should live on a farm. When I got married I didn’t marry a farmer´s wife.

HP: You pretty nearly have to be in a farm family to be able to cope with all the problems.

DSM: Well, I kept the farm that I had bought in 1917 until 1948 because I was interested in it. As long as we lived in Columbus, Ohio, before we moved to Washington, I was down there almost every

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weekend and occasionally on holidays. I would help out with the wheat harvest or occasionally with work of other kind. I liked to get my hand in again.

HP: You had a tenant farmer?

DSM: Yes, my uncle who used to help us butcher, had the farm for a number of years until he got older and then he took over the home farm of his in-laws and I had to get other tenants.

More About Fun During The Days On The Farm

DSM: Other fun that we had on the farm included horseback riding, horse racing as we got old enough to have a horse and rig of our own, youth parties which we usually enjoyed during the winter with an occasional one during the summer, including such things as taffy pulls, and parties with the kind of kid games that were played in those days including post office, etc.,

Games at school such as prisoner’s base, black man, sock ball and others, of course, were always fun. Hide-and-go-seek was a very common game and I assume that it still is. School socials, spelling bees, were always a part of the family fun.

I took great pleasure in taking on new tasks considered to be a man’s work. I mentioned already at the time of butchering I felt that I was beginning to grow up when my uncle suggested that I shoot the hogs.

I remember the first time that my Dad allowed me to plow for any length of time. I took over about the middle of the morning because we were trimming raspberries which I didn’t like to do.

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The hired man was doing the plowing so he let me go out and plow in his place. I finished out the day and I was so tired by evening that they were up with me half the night because my legs ached so badly that I couldn’t sleep. I was just a kid of course.

I loved to plow with a walking plow. There was something about watching the soil turn and the smell of the soil and the movement of the team. We had a good team. I just thoroughly enjoyed it. I have never gotten over it and I would still like to do it even though I nearly killed myself the first time around.

Taking a team at threshing time, which I mentioned, for the first time was fun.

There was hunting in the wintertime. We hunted without guns until we were old enough to have a gun. We usually had a dog. If we didn’t have one of our own we had a neighbor’s dog and we would chase a rabbit into a corn shock or into a culvert or ditch where we would poke him out.  We got a rabbit about every other time we went out hunting.

HP: The dog would catch it?

DSM: The dog would sometimes catch him but very seldom. We usually got them holed up some place where we could catch them without the dog’s help. He helped to tree them usually.

In the summertime we did a great deal of fishing. We used to keep the family in fish for breakfast. Very often we went to the lake, now called Buckeye Lake. It used to be called the Licking Reservoir. We would go over there in those days in an hour’s time you could catch forty or fifty nice blue gills or maybe a few perch mixed in or an occasional catfish. We would bring them home and clean them and we would have them for breakfast the next morning. There was nothing like a good fresh fish.

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These were in general the kinds of things we did. Of course in the wintertime we had skating and coasting in addition to the rabbit hunting. There were probably others that I have overlooked.

The Coming Of The Interurban And Related Items

DSM: There were certain new developments during the time when I was growing up that stand out in my memory. About the time I was twelve years of age, I presume 1902 or 1903, the Columbus, Newark and Zanesville interurban traction line was completed with a spur from Hebron to Buckeye Lake. It became known as Buckeye Lake after the traction company bought up land and established Buckeye Lake Park. This brought major changes and new experiences in my young life.

HP: I would like to hear what part that development played in your whole family life and in yours particularly.

DSM: Well, transportation, of course, into town, into the county seat and even into Columbus became very much easier. In order to get into Columbus before the traction line came in we had to take the T and OC Railroad and change at a place called Thurston and it took it seemed to me hours to get there.

HP: Toledo and Ohio Central?

DSM: Toledo and Ohio Central ran through our town of Hebron.

HP: How long did it take to get from home to Columbus?

DSM: I don’t remember exactly. I never did it over two or three times. I went to Columbus first when I was five years old. My Mother went to the hospital to have a nonmalignant tumor removed and my aunt

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took us up just before Christmas. It seemed to me the wait at Thurston was interminable. I suppose it took not over an hour and a half or two hours but it seemed an awfully long time. Then I remember we went on an excursion or two, a Sunday school excursion to Columbus by train.

HP: How would you get to the train?

DSM: Well, we took the train from Hebron which was three and a half miles from home.

HP: You took a horse and buggy?

DSM: We took a horse and buggy and put it in a livery stable until we got back if we went for a day, or somebody took you in and then went home.

HP: I never realized that the livery stable was sort of a boarding place.

DSM: Oh sure.

HP: The horses didn’t necessarily belong to the livery stable.

DSM: When we went to Newark we always put our horses up in the livery stable during the day while we were there, and they fed them at noon. We usually took our own corn but they fed them hay. We used to have what they called a ten cent barn. We could stand our horse and rig in there all day for a dime if we brought our own feed. They would charge you extra if they supplied the feed.

HP: Was this under cover?

DSM: Oh yes.

HP: Did you unhitch the vehicle?

DSM: Yes. We usually unhitched them although in this particular one you could stand them in and tie them up without unhitching the rig. But in most cases you did unhitch them. What the livery stable did, of course, was lease horses and carriages or buggies which they owned but they

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also took care of other peoples horses when they came into town.

To go back to the interurban line. This gave us the opportunity and the freedom which we did not have previously to travel with ease. Newark, our county seat, was about, depending on which way you went, nine or twelve miles from our home. During my high school days we went to the theatre many many times with our dates which we couldn’t possibly have done if we had been dependent upon a horse and buggy.

HP: You mean that you would drive into Hebron.

DSM: Yes or we could go in on the interurban on the spur to Buckeye Lake which was just across the field from us. In the wintertime though if we did that we walked home from Hebron at night. If you went early enough you could catch a car in because it ran until six o clock. But we did this very often. We would go in on the car or walk in and then we would walk home. Two and a half to three miles and we could do that in half an hour if we stepped right along on the railroad track.

We went to high school by taking the interurban, which ran to Hebron. It had a one-man motorman and conductor. He was awfully good to us. He would toot the whistle the minute he was ready to leave the park which was a little farther away than it was from our house down to the rail-road. We would start on the run and he would run slowly until he got down to the Neal’s crossing and we would just about make it there all out of breath. We would get on and he would grin and say "Well, I almost beat you this morning."

HP: How long would it take you to get there?

DSM: Oh just a whip-stitch, three or four minutes. It was only about a quarter of a mile.

HP: What was the fare, do you remember?

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DSM: It was a nickel to begin with; maybe it went up to a dime later. We went home from high school the same way.

I used to go to baseball games and the Grand Circuit Harness Races occasionally by interurban. As I got old enough I would sneak away from home and let on that I had gone some place else if I went to a Sunday baseball game because my Dad did not favor Sunday baseball games.

HP: This interurban really made an enormous change, didn’t it?

DSM: It opened up a whole new era. The opening of the summer resort which the interurban company did at Buckeye Lake changed our whole economy. We started selling milk, vegetables and produce to the hotels and to the cottagers who began to build cottages, or to rent cottages during the summer.

From the time I was about twelve or thirteen up till the time I went to college at age eighteen my Father and I delivered milk morning and evening by hand. We measured it out in a quart or a pint measure and poured it out into somebody’s pan. Of course the hotels would take maybe two to five gallons depending on the crowd expected. On a big day five or ten gallons.

HP: Did the interurban company build the hotels?

DSM: The railway company built one hotel and then there were others that were built privately near by.

HP: Summer hotels?

DSM: Yes. They were summer.

People started coming to the house to buy produce. There got to be so many of them that we decided to deliver. That’s the way it all got started.

When I got back from delivering milk in the morning I would help to harvest whatever vegetables

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that were ready and I would deliver such things as butter and eggs, sweet corn, green beans, apples and anything else that we had for sale.

HP: Who would set the price? Your Mother?

DSM: My Dad, I think, usually set the price.

HP: What did you use? Did you have a horse and carriage?

DSM: We made over an old buggy into a spring wagon that would haul quite a load of sweet corn for example. This was an experience, I suppose, that had a good deal to do with my learning to deal with people. You dealt with all kinds of people under these circumstances. Some people would like to fight with you.

I remember one old lady who was a good customer. She and I were good friends. But she came out one day and said "My milk soured. " She started to give me the devil about it, and I had just poured a pint of milk into her pan. She only took a pint of milk that morning. So I just picked it up and poured it back into my can and said "I’m sorry you don’t like our milk" and started on. You should have heard her. She wanted milk so she called me back. She never bawled me out again. Never.

HP: You had milked it that morning,

DSM: Oh sure. It was fresh milk but we didn’t cool it well enough and it is a wonder that it didn’t sour much more often than it did because we didn’t handle it as it ought to have been handled, but usually it was fresh enough and our cans were clean of course and if they took care of it properly they could keep it from morning to night at least or from morning until the next morning and they did not order more than they thought they were going to need.

HP: This added a cash income during the summer.

DSM: Oh absolutely. I used to carry a pocket full of change and of course when I got bills I would turn

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them in. But in the meantime I was allowed to spend anything that I thought I needed out of that cash. If I needed a bottle of pop I bought a bottle of pop which was amazing because we had been pretty frugal throughout the years but it taught me a bit about how to handle money.

HP: Did you extend any credit or was it cash basis?

DSM: We sold for cash. We sold tickets for milk if some one wanted to buy tickets to make it easier.

HP: They paid in advance.

DSM: That’s right. In this process of carrying a pocket full of change and selling produce for cash I learned much about human nature and I found some of it good and some of it bad.

HP: Were you shy? Was this an ordeal for you or did you enjoy it?

DSM: No. I think I enjoyed it. I was a shy farm kid and of course under certain conditions I was still shy but I had gotten pretty well accustomed to the routine and I knew most of the customers. Of course, there were strange people who came into the cottages for a week or two or three but I got so it didn’t bother me.

HP: Did they add to your sophistication? Some were probably rather sophisticated people compared to the ones you had known.

DSM: I don’t think there was too much difference.

HP: There wasn’t gambling or that sort of thing?

DSM: There was some of it but I didn’t see much of that.

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An Expansion Of Business

DSM: The demand increased our dairy herd. We had to do more milking, increase our vegetable production, and when we ran out of produce we bought from four or five neighbors if we had to have more. I used to go and pick up eggs and butter, milk even under certain conditions, if we had a big demand on holidays and big days.

HP: Would you call neighbors and ask if they had extra milk or how would you do that?

DSM: I usually went to these neighbors without calling because it was easier to go and check. We knew we could get produce in most cases because they would save it for us and during mid-summer we were usually able to handle most of the surplus that they had: such things as eggs, butter and current produce then in season.

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CHAPTER IV

GROWING UP DURING THE TEEN YEARS AND MY FIRST JOB

DSM: During the summers between ages around fifteen or sixteen to twenty-two at the time I graduated from college my brother and I would work all day on the farm; after work we would get rid of the day’s grime in the old cedar wash tub. Then garbed in clean clothes we would go to the park almost every night to dance or date or maybe just to watch other people. This usually meant late hours for farm boys and as a result it was not easy to crawl out of bed in the early morning or to start again after a thirty minute noonday’s siesta. Our Father many times pointed out that most of the people who frequented the park were on vacation, long or short, did not have to work the next day, so we should not try to do what they did because it was hard work all summer for us. But we persisted in spite of his admonitions and tired bodies. As I look back we put up with many aches and pains just so we could say we had been to the park every night.

I learned to dance on a public dance floor with the very much appreciated help of the older girls in our crowd. Roller skating was free to us because the operators of the skating rink kept a horse at our place. We also had free rides on the roller coaster because two of the head operators boarded with us for a time during the summer.

There was a strange interlude or two that may prove interesting. Our church decided one summer to sponsor a couple of so-called fresh air kids which meant that they were willing to arrange with their members to take a couple of kids from the city for two weeks where they could get out into the country and get the fresh air that they felt that they needed.

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About the time I was ten or eleven and my brother was thirteen or fourteen such a project was sponsored and my parents decided to take on two boys. It happened they were brothers and they were almost the same age as my brother and myself. Their names were Willie and Harry Graham from Columbus, Ohio. During the first few days of their stay my brother and I sat at their feet enthralled by stories of city life including the routines of their uncle’s livery stable.

When the city life stories began to be less interesting it occurred to us that maybe there were some exciting things that we could show them. It was fortunate that no one got hurt or killed for one of the first things that we did was to bridle up old "Queen" and "Gyp", a pair of bay carriage horses, and took them out into the pasture field and boosted the boys on to them without saddle, just bareback, and when we got them settled on their backs we stood back with a hitch strap each of us and gave the horses a crack across the back end that started them down through the field as hard as they could run. It happened that the boys did survive. I think at least one of them fell off before they slowed down but nobody got stepped on.

We then remembered that there were two or three bumblebee nests in the recently harvested meadow so we maneuvered them so that they walked through them while we were on the flanks and of course they got stung and they had to do the fighting. These experiences and others taught a couple of city boys that all the excitement did not lie in the cities.

On Sundays we went to Sunday school and Church regularly. I went through all the paces from the Primary Sunday school class to the passing of the collection baskets during the time I was a teenager. My Father was a dedicated Methodist layman and a pillar in the church but he didn’t have us baptized and entered into the membership of the church as babies because he felt it should be our own choice. This situation lead to a continuing challenge to our several successive ministers to get Johnny Myer’s boys into membership and consequently we were preached

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to and at so often that we became bored and obstinate. As a result during my years on the farm I did not join the church.

I neglected to mention one other instance in relation to the Boxwell or Patterson examination which I mentioned earlier. They had a commencement for the people who had passed that examination. I had a "piece" to speak. I think the title was "Should The Farmers Go On A Strike." When I got up to say my piece the first line eluded me completely and I stood there before the audience embarrassed. It seemed to me it was five minutes it probably was not over half a minute but long enough that I could see my uncles and others looking down their noses and feeling sorry for me. It was an experience that I shall never forget. The line finally came to me and I took off. Once I got started I went through it in a hurry.

High School

DSM: The high school which we attended was at Hebron, Ohio, and it was a small high school. My brother had not gone to high school previously because they had not had a good high school up to this time so we both started at the same time. He lasted only one year because he couldn’t stand the pressure and the feeling of wounded pride that he had of having to go to school with his younger brother who was almost three years younger than he was. So he quit at the end of his freshman year and I continued.

Six boys and six girls graduated in my graduation class which indicates something of the size of the institution. We went to high school on the interurban which fortunately ran all through the winter during the daytime.

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These were the days of horse and buggy courting, hay wagon parties, kid parties, birthday surprise parties, etc. These were the things that made up most of the social life other then skating and sledding in the wintertime. The school was not big enough for a football team. It was hardly big enough for a baseball team but we had one, but we usually had to run in a ringer or two who was not in school anymore in order to make out a team of nine players.

We had a debating team which was pretty good. One instance that I remember quite distinctly was when we went to Kirkersville , which was six miles up the pike toward Columbus, to debate the Kirkersville High School one night and afterward when we came out to get on the interurban we were egged by a bunch of hoodlums and most of us went home with eggs all over our overcoats.

HP: Do you remember what things you debated, what subjects?

DSM: I don’t remember what subjects we debated. I do remember that I was the cheerleader in those days and about the only place you did any cheerleading was at the debates. How I happened to be selected I don’t know. Anyhow, I probably could still give some of the old high school cheers.

My Early Courting Days

DSM: I had two girls during this period. The first one was about half as tall as I now am. A little bit of a thing and fortunately she didn’t think I was quite her style so I started going with another girl. Ruth Pence was her name. I went with her all the rest of high school and all the way through college.

We decided to call it quits about the time I was in my senior year when I decided to go to Kentucky to

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teach I stopped by her house and got all of the fraternity pins and the sort of jewelry that she didn’t need anymore.

I suppose going steady was a good thing for me because it sort of kept me running straight if I had been loose I don’t know what I would have done.

During this time Ruth’s father for some reason or other got mad and upset. I don’t think he knew quite why but in order to be mean which he was at times, he decided that I shouldn’t come to the house but that didn’t stop us. I used to drive up in front of the house with my horse and buggy and Ruth would step out and we would go riding across the countryside. Finally he wanted to give a party for her on one of her birthdays, but she said no, she didn’t want a party, because I couldn’t come. So he broke over and let me come after which I went to the house again regularly.

He was one of those people. He just got twisted up one day and this was the orneriest thing he could think of, I guess. She was an only daughter and I think he thought I was getting too serious. I don’t know for sure. But that didn’t break things up. As a matter of fact I think it made things worse.

Buckeye Lake Park during the summer, as I have already indicated, was a gathering place and it was a regular thing that our gang from Hebron came out on Saturday nights and we would meet them at the interurban. This was dance night at Buckeye Lake.

Innovations And Transition

DSM: During the period of my growing up during the country school days and high school days a number of important things happened which stand out in my memory. Probably the first one was the initiation

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of the rural free mail delivery in our area which happened about 1900. Incidentally one of our neighbors who was a law into himself never put in a mailbox and didn’t accept mail from the rural free delivery because he said then he would have no excuse to go to town. He drove to town to get his mail all the rest of his life.

Our first telephone, a party line with eight families on it, on which our ring was five, came when I was probably around eleven or twelve years of age. This was quite a thrill and of course it was used for many things besides business. One thing that I recall quite vividly was that the chap who was the beau of one girl who worked for us used to bring his Edison phonograph along occasionally. It had the horn, the round wax records that he kept in cotton and pulled out with two fingers and slipped onto the cylinder. He had the usual group of songs and music of that day and an occasional record of Josh Billings such as the one about the lightening rod salesman.

My Dad used to call up cousins and others clear across the county and at other exchanges Potaskala
and Jersey and got them on the line and would say "Now we’re going to play 'Listen To The Mockingbird' " Then he would set the receiver down on the little shelf and it would play away and then he would go back and check. Maybe they would play four or five tunes for them. They kept the phone busy often but fortunately nobody was calling a doctor at that time.

My first automobile ride was an important event. It probably happened about 1902 or 1903. Two gentlemen came walking up an alternate lane we had which wasn’t used a great deal and left their car down on the road which was more than a quarter of a mile away to see whether or not they could leave their automobile in our barn or shed. When Dad told them that they might, they invited us to go down with them and ride up.

It was one of the early Buicks which had a door in the back with a step that you used to step up into from behind. My brother and I got in and of

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course we were bumping each other with elbows and giggling and having a great time. It was quite a thrill. The ride was less than a half mile. Somewhere between a quarter and a half mile but it seemed like a worthwhile ride to us.

The coming of free natural gas and the advent of a furnace to supply central heat was one of the greatest things that happened to me during my young life.

The purchase of our first automobile in 1913 was a big event. This did not happen until I was in college. I remember quite distinctly that we debated between buying an Oakland and a Studebaker. We finally bought the Studebaker because it had jump seats and would haul seven passengers instead of five in a pinch even though it was only a four cylinder car. We all learned to drive during this period except my Dad and Mother. Dad tried but when he hit the gate post once he decided he wouldn’t ever drive again so the boys did all the driving.

Fords had become quite common by this time. I think the first Ford garage and sales agency was established in our hometown in 1909 and it wasn’t very long until model T Fords were beginning to ramble around the countryside and scare all the horses and cause trouble generally.

The period from 1891, the year of my birth, to 1914-, the year when I graduated from college, was in reality a period of transition from the horse and buggy days to the machine age throughout the country. This transition I am sure had an important bearing upon my life and future development. The invention of the auto in the early 1890´s, and the gradual emergence of the automobile as a means of transportation between 1900 and 1914 had a tremendous impact on communications between people and communities and upon the economy.

During this same period the interurban electric line came into general use, particularly in the Mid-West. The coming of the Rural Free Delivery and the rural telephone lines were particularly important

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in widening the scope of communications and contact with the world outside of the traditional rural neighborhoods

One of the developments that was brought about with the coming of the interurban line, which had a great impact on my young life, was the opening of the Buckeye Lake Park and the resultant pattern of construction of summer cottages already mentioned. This made a major change in our economy.

In addition to the changes in transportation and communications which were developing step by step there were other important changes during this period from 1891 to 1914.

Progress in the development of farm machinery and storage facilities was notable. New barns with large mows providing increased storage space for hay. Mechanical hay forks and manure carriers were coming into use all over central Ohio. Our new barn was built about 1906.

Along with the new barn came hay loaders, side delivery rakes replacing the old wooden dump rakes, or the metal sulky rakes, which meant that most of the hay crop was taken directly from the swath or the wind row and packed into the mow eliminating the ricks and stacks which had been the previous method of storage. Silos came into use. Part of the corn crop was cut early and ensiled for use throughout the season when pasture was not available.

Corn binders and ensilage cutters came into use generally during this period. The corn pickers came in at a later date. Potato planters and mechanical diggers came into use, relieving many of the backaches for potato growers but not all of them.

Mechanical sprayers for orchards came into general use during the early 1900s along with the problem of controlling the San Jose scale. They helped to extend the life of many home orchards for only a few years before the commercial orchards took over.

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Self binders for grain, with sheaf carriers also arrived during this period. The development of the combine harvester which nowadays is common came later.

Intermingled with all the hard farm work and onerous chores there were many pleasures which helped to make life livable. There were always horses to ride for both business and pleasure. Rabbit hunting with dog and no gun in the early years and later both rabbit and quail hunting were fun times. Fishing in the summer was a good sport and we had good fishing spots within walking distance.

Evenings around the fire in the winter with apples and popcorn were also fun. Social affairs at the country school were well attended and added to the social life of the community. Later teenage parties were quite common during our high school days.

College Years

DSM: I had a bit of a problem in coming to a decision about where to attend college. My Father wanted me to attend Ohio Wesleyan and he was hoping that I would be his one son that might be willing to become a Methodist minister. I’m sure he felt very badly that I didn’t do this but instead I made a decision to go to the College of Agriculture at Ohio State University.

This decision was probably influenced by the fact that a Penn State graduate by the name of Clarence Henry had arrived in the community about the time I was a high school freshman, as the superintendent of the Wherely Farm. The Wherely family were the owners of a large stove foundry in Newark and they had a large farm between Hebron and Newark. "Pat" Henry was receiving $1200 per year and living quarters for managing this large farm and this seemed like a tremendous income. In addition job opportunities for

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agricultural graduates appeared to be available with good paying salaries rather generally. So I enrolled in the fall of 1910 in the College of Agriculture.

On my first day on the campus I met a cousin of one of our local girls with whom I had gone to high school. Her name was Gladys Reese. She introduced me to a young man by the name of Chester Engle who immediately asked me to go with him to his fraternity house for lunch. I had had no experience whatsoever with fraternities but it so happened that this introduction led to my accepting the pledge from the Alpha Zeta fraternity which was an agricultural fraternity.

This proved to be a very important factor in my college work I’m sure mainly because of the fact that the fraternity had a record of good grades. On the whole they were excellent students and the older members of the fraternity, juniors and seniors, saw to it that the younger members were doing their work properly and if they needed help they didn’t hesitate to do the kind of kindly tutoring which was very often needed.

My grades were only average during my college years. It seems that I had no aspirations to be an honor or merit student. I learned after my first several months in school that I could get passing grades by going to the library in between classes and laboratory periods during the day and then I spent too much time playing cards in the evening or on trips downtown to shows and in other recreational activities which took up time that might well have been devoted to my school work

I did pass all my courses however, with only one condition and that came about because of my poor art work in Zoology Laboratory. After I received the condition I went to see Doctor Osburn about it. He was my lecture and classroom work professor. He was a kindly, elderly gentleman and he said he didn’t understand it because his grade book showed that I had a grade of between ninety and one hundred in his class work and finally he asked me who my lab instructor was and I told him Professor Barrows. With a

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kindly and knowing grin he said "I think you had better see Professor Barrows." I did and I found that he was the one that gave me the condition. It was agreed that if I passed off the second semester satisfactorily in his lab I wouldn’t need to take an exam to pass off the condition. I’m sure that he may have been sorry about this later because I never left the lab on any lab day without getting his approval of the work that I had done. Anyhow I did pass the course and it was the only condition that I received during the four years.

Along about the time I was a sophomore I happened to be around the fraternity house one evening when almost everybody else was out and two of the alumni who were then attached to the university came by and sat down on our porch to visit. Jack Livingston who was teaching Agronomy, field crops to be exact, was one of those. After we had talked awhile he asked me what I was going to select as a major. I told him I didn’t know; I supposed animal husbandry. This seemed to be the popular thing in those days. He said "Well, a lot of people seem to think that that is the thing to do but I’ll tell you what to do. You decide to major in Agronomy and field crops and when you get through I’ll see to it that you have a job if you want one." This impressed me and I suppose it was a real factor in my determining to specialize in the Agronomic field.

At the beginning of my sophomore year I moved into the fraternity house and my roommate was a chap by the name of Ralph Kenny who was already specializing in Agronomy and we got to be very close friends and he was most helpful to me.

Later on when he graduated he took up work at the University of Kentucky as an instructor in Agronomy and assistant at the Agricultural Experiment Station. This happened at the beginning of my junior year and later on he had a job offer from Kansas State College, at Manhattan, Kansas, and decided to take it. He recommended me for his replacement at the University of Kentucky.

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When this happened I was in the first semester of my senior year. I was taking a course in soils under Dr. McCall who was head of the Agronomy Department and during this time he gave an exam shortly before the holidays which somehow or other I didn’t seem to be able to do much about. Out of ten questions I had only answered four during the hour. In other words I flunked the exam out and out.

It was rather interesting though, during the holidays Prof. McCall had gone to Lexington, Kentucky, to judge a corn show and to appear on their Farmer´s Week program at the university. When he returned he called me aside and said "Myer, what was the matter with you on the examination we gave before the holidays?" I said "I have no excuse whatsoever. I simply didn’t have time to finish the exam. I was too slow in making up my mind in regard to the answers and I just missed it." Well He said "I was down in Kentucky during the holidays and Prof. Roberts asked me about you and I recommended you for the job which Ralph Kenny is leaving."

I could have thrown my arms around him but I didn’t. I thought it was a great gesture on his part. He told me he thought I could do the job. As a consequence, I went to Kentucky in mid-year. They asked me to come down to see them in January which I did and they decided they would like to have me join the staff. As a consequence I arranged to go down and start teaching during the second semester.

In the meantime Dean Price of the College of Agriculture at Ohio State was teaching a course in farm management which was the only required course that I hadn’t completed, but I still had eight hours total that I needed to complete in order to graduate. Dean Price agreed that I might go to Kentucky and substitute for his course as well as to take the extra credit hours on a part time basis and to transfer my credits back to Ohio in June of 1914- to get my degree. This I did.

To go back for a moment to my college life. It seems to me to have been somewhat uneventful. The
greatest thing that happened to me was that I was

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given an opportunity to become an Alpha Zeta. I had some wonderful friends among this group plus a great deal of contact with agricultural leaders who had graduated from the fraternity and in many ways I profited from having been a member of the organization.

Social activities were largely fraternity affairs with occasional dances or parties, attendance at the theater was usually limited to "peanut gallery" seats for shows and of course these seats were cheap but we went very often as good shows came into town. They had a new theater .called the Hartman Theater in Columbus and we used to go down and stand in line late in the day to get a good seat in "peanut heaven." Occasionally we went to the old Munich, or later to the Kaiserhoff cafes for a bit of a drinking bout. I look back on some of these parties as not only interesting but fun.

I think I may have already mentioned a young lady who I had gone with all through high school and through most of college during this period. While we had some dates during the last year or two of college for the most part I had dates with other girls during this time. It was when I went to Kentucky to take over my new job that I stopped by to pick up the jewelry that I had given her and to bid her goodbye.

My Years At The University of Kentucky -- The First Job

DSM: During my two years at the University of Kentucky I served as instructor in Agronomy in the Kentucky Agriculture College and assistant in Agronomy at the Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station. Most of my work at the experiment station was during the summer season after school was out in the spring and before it started in the fall, although I did have some contact with experimental work throughout the year.

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My pay for the first five months during the time when I was finishing up my school work for needed credits was $50 per month which was later raised to $83.35 per month for the rest of the time that I was there. In other words I was getting on a full time basis $1,000 a year.

During this period I taught courses in cereal crops and forage crops to both the two year students and the four year students, also taught a course in farm weeds which had not been taught before and which I had to prepare for in great detail. I assisted in the soil laboratory during one of these years and during the first summer I assisted Prof. S.C. Jones in Soil Survey work in Franklin County, Kentucky, and in Graves County, Kentucky. This work consisted mainly in taking soil samples with a soil auger and labeling them to conform to the soil map in which the soil types had been mapped.

I was given the responsibility for the wheat variety tests and the soy bean variety tests during my second year.

During these two years I really learned how to study efficiently for the first time. It was necessary in order to keep ahead of my various classes and it’s only too bad that I hadn’t learned how to do an efficient job of studying before I graduated from college.

I had two wonderful years in the lush and beautiful blue grass country where they raised thoroughbred horses, tobacco, and other farm crops and also good dairy cattle and good beef cattle. It was a beautiful country and I never tired of traveling around through the countryside. It was an interesting and profitable two years and in spite of the fact that I was getting only $1,000 a year I saved $200 a year out of my very limited salary.

I had two wonderful bosses; Prof. George Roberts who was head of the department was one and Mr. Ed Kinny who really had charge of the crops work and was more closely related to my particular field than was

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Prof. Roberts and was second in command. He not only taught field crops but he also was a geneticist. These two gentlemen trusted me implicitly and delegated experimental work and teaching spots as well as speaking engagements throughout the state. I had full support on everything I did. This trust and support was an important factor in the development of badly needed self-confidence and provided experience in public speaking and in student relations as well as in research techniques and knowledge.

In addition to good relations with my own department and bosses, my living arrangements were such that during the last several months of my stay in Lexington I was closely associated with professors and instructors in the fields of Veterinary Medicine, Horticulture, and Poultry. This provided an opportunity to gain knowledge in fields that were helpful later as I entered county agent work and extension work in Indiana.

About my only recreation during this stay in Kentucky, particularly during the first year, was usually a vaudeville show on Saturday night. I had very few dates during my time there. I went bowling with some of my friends who boarded at the same boarding house as I did. Some of us enjoyed long Sunday walks through the blue grass countryside and after I moved into the household where there were a number of friends whom I have mentioned from the Veterinary, Horticulture and Poultry Departments we occasionally had penny ante games which got a little bit out of hand shortly before I left. However I never lost much money in the penny ante games. I did develop some very excellent friendships with some wonderful people, some of whom I have kept in touch with throughout the rest of my life.

My old friend and boss Edwin Kinny passed away only a few months ago. He came to Washington to live with a daughter for his last few years and I visited him on a number of occasions and we enjoyed talking about old times during 1914 and 1915.

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Prof. George Roberts, who was head of the department, recommended me for a raise each year but the dean didn’t feel that a raise was important. He was a chemist. If I had been a chemist I would have been more important in his eyes. So after the second turndown I was somewhat disgusted so I sat down and wrote a letter to Prof. S.C. Jones who I had aided in soil survey work in 1914- and who had moved to Purdue University in the meantime. After bringing him up to date on the local gossip and telling him of my frustration I rather lightly told him that if he saw any jobs lying around loose in my field to let me know.

He took me seriously and upon receipt of my letter he immediately recommended me to T.A. Coleman, the County Agent leader for Indiana, as a prospective county agent. His recommendation worked and I was invited to Purdue for an interview and as a result I was ultimately hired as the first County Agricultural Agent for Vanderburgh County, at Evansville, Indiana.

GO TO Chapter V