Financing the Farm

Before we bought the place I can recall only one encounter with the Joe Johnson farm. On one occasion my mother was involved in some church activity at one of the farmsteads near the place and for some reason I was to join her there after school let out. To get there I took the school bus. The bus driver was rather inept and in turning around in the farmyard got stuck in a snow drift. Perhaps the incident served to fix the whole event in my mind.

Harris I knew of course — he was my age and he and his twin sister Deloris were in my confirmation class. A likable enough individual but quite mediocre in capability.

Old Joe was a rather large, blustery sort of man. On one occasion he bought 10 bushels of potatoes from my uncle Carl. It was well along in the spring so the potatoes he bought were quite small, really the dregs of the crop. As I recall they were the small potatoes that had been sorted out from the general run. He paid $1 per bushel. I guess he must have been trying to provide cheap food for his rather large family. He was not a particularly good or industrious farmer (I don’t think Harris was either and the farm was on the weedy side when we bought it).

The acreage we had in the Joe Johnson farm was augmented when my mother died and my father’s estate was settled. He had willed the farm to his children with the proviso that my mother would have the income from it as long as she lived. My inheritance amounted to about 40 acres and we purchased the rest of the 80 in which it was a part (the north half of my father’s farm) to help in settling the estate. We assumed a debt to Marold as his share of the estate and as I recall we paid it off in a few years.

The loan we took from my mother we had paid off 3 or 4 years after buying the Joe Johnson place. She wanted the money back to be used in constructing a new house on the farm. As I recall we came up with the repayment, in part at least by refinancing the debt we had on 411 Bonnie Drive. The loan to Prudential was paid off in 1980; there had been periodic payments over the years and finally a “balloon” payment of $15,000 in March of 1980.

There was a curious occurrent in connection with the last payment. I kept expecting a final notice from Prudential (their Minnesota office handled the loan payments) and none came. Usually the notices in previous years of the principal and interest due would arrive a month or so before the March 1 due date. I wrote several letters and finally was in telephone contact with someone in Minneapolis (for some reason I remember writing their office in Fresno earlier).

It turned out that the individual handling our final payment (as well as several others) had left the company, leaving the files as unfinished business in his desk. What would have happened had I not investigated the lack of action by the company I don’t know. The lackadaisical performance by Prudential only emphasized in my ming the quality (or lack of it) in the typical insurance company. I have had similar experiences with the Equitable Life insurance company with whom I have two small life insurance policies.

So in the end I had my desire for the ownership of some Iowa land fulfilled. When Vincent decided to sell out his farming operation, he first offered his half of my father’s farm to us and I thought about it for awhile. Had I been younger I think I could have taken him up on his offer but at my age at the time I decided not to. Since then I have wondered if I made the right decision or not.