Luck and Circumstance

As I stop to reflect on my uncle I realize that he was quite probably the dominant male in my early life. Much more so than even my father who always seemed to be in the background. Maybe this was due to my impressionable teenage years when I was working for him on the farm. I can’t say that I really liked him; I respected him but his crusty personality kept me from really liking him.

I realize now that he had our family and me as matters of concern to him. I recall how he took Vincent and me along with him on his periodic visits to Iowa State College to keep up on the latest developments in agriculture. Was he thinking that someday we would be farmers as he was? And sort of preparing us for that role in life?

Had it not been for the scholarship I received after my two years at Fort Dodge junior college to attend the University of Iowa, what would I have done with my life? Enlist in the military or wait and be drafted?

When I finished at the junior college in 1940, my father had inherited the basic Strand farm from my grandfather. My cousin Leonard was the tenant. Could I have started farming? I recall that my uncle Carl had helped one of our neighbors during the first year he tried to be a farmer. Would I have borrowed the wherewithal to begin farming from him? I could easily see myself as an Iowa farmer; it would have been easy for me to drift into it, even had I gone into the military and survived it would have been a path of low resistance to me.

Again I feel that events shaped my life and that I exerted no choice in the matter. I went away to Iowa, became a chemical engineer with Shell, but I could just as easily ended up as an Iowa farmer.