Threshing

Another of the farm devices that was periodically giving trouble was the pump on the barnyard well. It seemed that every year, Uncle Carl would be called on to repair the well pump. There again, the well pipe and rod were in need of replacement, but not before the failed to operate completely. Added to Uncle Carl’s resume, was the job of plumber as we hoisted the forty-foot extension ladders in a tripod to pull the 100-foot pipe. Yes, the pipe rusted out, the piston rod failed, but it would always be patched. Never replaced!

Probably the main activity of the summer season on the farm in those days was the harvesting of the oat crop. First it was to cut, bind, and shock the oats, and then to thresh them. Uncle Carl was one of the first to purchase a ten-foot power-take-off binder. This was necessitated by the demise of the old Acme binder. One of the first tractor driving jobs that we had was in steering the tractor pulling the binder while Uncle Carl sat on the binder seat. We didn’t always drive straight or turn the corners right, but the oats were cut. Then it was to place the tied oat bundles in shocks. This usually came in some of the hottest days of the summer. There was always an earthen jug wrapper in a wet gunny-sack to quench our thirst. We boys drank from it often, Uncle Carl sparingly.

Then the threshing season began. There were eight to ten farms involved. Uncle Carl was the owner of the threshing rig, a huge 48-inch cylinder Huber threshing machine, and a mammoth Hart Parr tractor. At one time he owned and operated as many as four of these combinations. When we moved to the farm in 1933, there were three remaining, but only one in operating condition. During World War II days, all of them were junked and went into the war effort. There was a lot of steel and cast iron in them.

Each year the procedure to get the threshing rig ready was the same. The threshing machine (or separator) was pulled out of the shed at the lower farmstead. This took some doing since it had sunk into the dirt floor of the shed. The small Hart Parr (a smaller version of the big one) was used for this. The separator was pulled up to the location of the tool shed where various repairs were made. Then it was to go to the cow yard where the big hart Parr had been parked since the last threshing season. Most years it took quite a bit of effort to get it running. There were prime cups to fill with gas to get it started, and as it warmed up, the fuel was shifted to tractor fuel. The cranking mechanism was a five-foot-diameter cast iron flywheel that Uncle Carl would climb upon and use his weight to get it slowly to move. At times we would have to belt the little Hart Parr to the bigger one to get the big one started.

So now the rig was ready and the threshing season began. If good weather prevailed, it would last about two weeks. Uncle Carl was in charge since he owned the rig, and it was done according to his direction. One year my older brother Carl and I hauled bundles. My job was to place the bundles on the hayrack as my brother pitched them up to be placed on the rack. I had specific instructions from Uncle Carl as to how to place the bundles since he was the one who unloaded them at the threshing machine. My brother Carl remembers quite vividly the day on the Peterson farm when going through a gate by the barn, the hayrack tipped over dumping the whole load. That night one of the team of horses, Barney, took off into the neighbor’s cornfield and died from sleeping sickness. It was felt that the reason for the tipped rack was that Barney was indeed quite sick at the time.

My next job on the threshing circuit was to be Uncle Carl’s tractor man. The job was pretty well laid out for me with the usual explicit instructions. Uncle Carl and I were the first on the scene in the morning and the last off in the evening. The instructions included filling grease cups on the separator a very certain way, installing the belts on the separator, pouring fuel from the tank-wagon into the tractor fuel tank, and in general doing “flunky” work. As the threshing day evolved, it was my job to watch and shut down the tractor if things went wrong. The specific instructions were to see that the bundles were going in, tailing belt working, and that the oats and straw were coming out of the machine. More than once I was not alert and Uncle Carl came running back to shut off the rig. Not a word was said!

There were times of repair which were time consuming with fifteen to twenty men and boys standing around waiting. Many times it was to repair belts. One time, the head of one of the two pistons of the tractor broke off necessitating a major tractor overhaul.

I recall several instances that have stuck in my mind. One was at a neighbor’s place who had planted oats on a particularly rich piece of ground. The bundles that the binder had made were quite large and fluffy. Two of the farmers wanted Uncle Carl to take out the dividing board in the feeder. He would not do so. One of them handed Uncle Carl his pitchfork and told him to pitch the bundles. He did it, but not without considerable effort.

Another time was on a Saturday evening. Two of the young men were throwing bundles into the feeder. No doubt it was time to get the job done quickly so they could get home and get ready for dates with their girlfriends. They were overloading the separator and Uncle Carl reprimanded them and stood at the top of the head and made them pitch the bundles in at an extremely slow rate. I’m sure that they did get home for their dates, but Uncle Carl did assert his authority in a “take charge” manner.

I did put all the belts on each morning except for two that operated the straw racks. Uncle Carl wanted them put on a certain way. I could put the, on, but he would chem them and then drop the tighteners. One morning we were blowing the straw into a barn, and he forgot to drop the tighteners. Since we couldn’t see the straw coming out, everything seemed okay. All of a sudden reality set in, and about half of the two bundle loads of straw were packed into the inside of the separator. That time it was not my fault.

The tractor had one belt that ran the governor. The belt, as many of Uncle Carl’s belts, was a little beyond normal usage. My instructions were that if the belt should break, to cut the ignition switch, grab a pliers and wrench, and hold down the valve arms to keep them from operating. This was to keep the tractor from dieseling, and theoretically, flying to pieces until it cooled down. Fortunately, the one time that the belt broke, Uncle Carl was at hand and took care of the situation. I guess I had a picture of the tractor flying to pieces, which seemed impossible, but the idea had been instilled in my mind.

All in all, the threshing season was one of community endeavor. The meals were good, and a certain amount of “horseplay” took place. There were years when the season was long because of rainy weather. One year especially when the bundles were taken out of standing water to be threshed. My one claim to importance was that I was Uncle Carl’s tractor man. I have understood that I followed in the footsteps of Uncle Carl’s brother Milton, who became a Lutheran pastor. He had an earned doctorate in theology, and was a teacher of Old Testament at Luther Seminary in St. Paul. I did not follow in his footsteps as an adult, but from what I have heard of his discipline in the classroom, I am sure that some of it came from the years that he was under Uncle Carl’s tutelage.

Cows

Although Uncle Carl was not a livestock man, he did acquire a herd of cows for we Strand boys to milk. Our dad had brought a cow with him from the small town (Gowrie) that we lived in. Uncle Carl had one too, a brown Swiss, which soon had a calf, “Susan,” which was raised to be an addition to the small herd. As time passed, two Guernseys, a Shorthorn, and a Holstein were added to the herd. Unconventional as he was, he did believe in diversity When we Strand boys get together in these years, there are many talks of this rather nondescript group of cows. Sanitary conditions for milking were atrocious, and the feed for the cows was meager. Since we had no bull, we soon learned the facts of life as we chased the “bulling cows” to the neighbor’s cow yard for the necessary act.

The winter months with cows around brought a pile of manure (“joy”) heaped up behind the barn. One of the jobs we boys were assigned to was to pitch this into the manure spreader and haul it to the field for spreading. This would have been simple enough except that the spreader was continually breaking down. Not an implement of high priority, Uncle Carl kept patching and fixing it beyond reasonable time, and we had special instructions from him as to how to load the contraption to alleviate any undue strain on its mechanical parts.

Uncle Carl: Potatoes

The major part of this description of Uncle Carl’s life has to do with my experiences and recollections of my life on the Peterson farm from 1933–1942 and from 1951 to his death in 1968. During these later years, I returned to farm on my dad’s farm. The years from 1942–1948, I was in the army and in college. I then worked in Des Moines, Iowa, from 1948–1951.

In order to orient oneself to those earlier years on the Peterson farm, a description of the farm is appropriate. The farm consisted of 200 acres of good Iowa soil purchased by Grandfather Peterson while raising a family of ten children. One child died early in life. The home ’80 was the original purchase on which my grandparents started farming. As the years progressed, an east ’40, south ’40, and a north ’40 were added. The building site was rather large for the size of the farm. It consisted of about eight acres. The large rambling house that we moved into in 1933 was located on a knoll close to the road. Out-building consisted of a granary, barn, chicken house, tool shed, hog house, machine shed, corn crib, and threshing machine shed. At the time that the Strand family moved onto the farm, the farmstead was scattered with a variety of usable and obsolete farm machinery belonging to Uncle Carl. There were assorted garden patches, fruit trees, and on the northwest corner of the farm place was a windbreak of closely planted walnut trees, presumably planted by Uncle Carl.

Onto this rather extensive and fascinating environment, the Clarence Strand family of eight descended, and into our lives came Uncle Carl with all of his personality traits. Having been raised as the first of eleven children in a very meager life style, he was the very personification of a WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) with a work ethic that was ingrained in him from childhood. As I worked for him and with him, there was no time for idle hands or speech. The job was to be done with as little fanfare as possible.

One of the first activities that I became involved in (with him) was on one of his “jerry-rigged” potato planters. My sister Vivian and I were chosen to ride on a modified two row corn planter, each of us sitting on a seat over a row. Our duty was to, at regular intervals, drop a potato seed piece down a section of rain-spout to the opening made by the corn planter runner. It did not take long for Uncle Carl to see that we were not qualified to do this job, so our dad and a neighbor, Will Lines, took over for us. A year lated the planter was modified with a moving, flighted chain as that there was no mistaking the correct interval. Vivian and I got our jobs back!

Potatoes were very important to Uncle Carl, and I imagine that he saw in the Strand “brood” plenty of unused labor. Through our growing-up years, the numerous jobs associated with the potato crop were assigned to us, from sorting, de-sprouting, cutting for planting, the actual planting, and then the harvest season. At harvest time, we were instructed many evenings after school to use pails and pick up the potatoes after the potato digger, and then dump them into the horse drawn lumber wagon. In the evening, it was to scoop them into a basement room, rolling them down a steel roofing sheet formed as a trough. My brother Verner reminds us often of the rumble of potatoes down the trough.

One of the places that potatoes were planted was in a drained peat pond rented from the neighbors. The peat might have been good for potatoes, but not for a pleasant environment. After picking potatoes at harvest time, the peat dust caused a lot of itching. As I have noted, Uncle Carl was not the conventional farmer with cattle, hogs, and chickens. He was the only one in the neighborhood that raised field potatoes. One thing for sure, the Strand clan would never go hungry with a room full of Early Ohios or Rural New Yorkers in the basement! Much of Uncle Carl’s winter activity went to the sale and distribution of this crop.

Uncle Carl: A Unique Individual

[In the course of going boxes looking for family photos with which to illustrator Naomi's family history, I found a copy of the reminiscence that my uncle Vincent compiled about his uncle Carl.]

CARL ALGOT PETERSON

1870-1968

Memories by Vincent T. Strand

Uncle Carl Algot Peterson was born in Illinois in 1879. His mother had been sent there from Gowrie, Iowa, a year after her marriage to her step-uncle (my grandfather). Grandfather Peterson had returned to the goldfields of Montana, presumably to earn funds to start farming northeast of the village of Gowrie. He had worked there for some years prior to the marriage.

Upon his return from his year in Montana, Grandmother Peterson insisted that Grandfather stay on the eighty acres that he had purchased, and there become a farmer. So Uncle Carl was the first of eleven children born to this family. The Peterson family history has been chronicled by my mother, and it is not my purpose to expound upon that. I was the one of the nieces and nephews who had the most contact with Uncle Carl during our adolescent and growing up years. Upon the suggestion of my brothers and sister and several of my cousins, I will attempt to relate remembrances from his life. I am sure that my recollections will not always jibe with others in the family. Our perceptions of events and people are quite varied, so I hope that I do not seem too positive at times.

In the spring of 1933, my own family of Dad and Mother Strand with six children made a move to the Peterson family farm home northeast of Gowrie. This move was necessitated by the fact that my dad had lost his job at the local bank due to the Depression. The decision was made to move to the farm and into the large rambling Peterson farm home. Grandmother Peterson had moved to town some years before, to a large, square, two-story home with a large attic, where she lived with several unmarried children, including Uncle Carl. As far as I know, Grandfather Peterson never lived in that house. He died on the farm in 1915.

At that time, I assume that Uncle Carl became the masculine head of the family which he held until his death in 1968. Since he was only 17 years younger than his mother, he was often mistaken for her husband in later years. I am also assuming that the house in Gowrie was his home from the time that it was built until he moved to a nursing home in Madrid in his later years. The house in Gowrie was built on a lot purchased by his father many years before. My understanding is that the plan of the house was much of Uncle Carl’s idea, including a sleeping porch on the south side, with casement windows on the southeast and west. This was Uncle Carl’s sleeping quarters.

Until the time of our move to the farm in 1933, my contact with Uncle Carl was typical of that at family gathering and the first years on the farm were similar also. We were four Strand boys ranging in age from four to twelve at that time. Looking at his nephews, it probably became apparent to Uncle Carl that he could use us on the farm. My father soon got a job in nearby Fort Dodge, leaving his sons to the instruction of Uncle Carl as to farm duties.

Uncle Carl had taken charge of the farming of the Peterson farm in 1926, when his brother Serenus quit farming to become a Lutheran pastor. He continued to farm the land until the farm was sold in 1959. He lived in town with his mother and unmarried sisters and a brother. He drove daily to the farm during the crop season. He was not interested in raising livestock and so during the winter months, the daily trip to the farm was not made. During the years that the Strand family lived on the farm, he ate the noonday meal with us.

His usual day began at 4:00 a.m. Breakfast was of a very standard variety consisting of oatmeal, a soft boiled egg, dried hard toast, a selection of sauce, and his usual glass of water. Until later years, I cannot remember his drinking anything but water, and that had to be at a temperature that he approved of, neither too hot or too cold. There was some indication that he would drink some cocoa or maybe milk, but I never saw him do this. Leaving for the farm between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m., he usually had nearly a full day’s work dome by 12:00 noon. He would then eat the noon meal with us, take a 15–20 minute nap on the leather couch, and then off to work again. The routine did not vary much from day to day. He returned to his home in Gowrie about 6:00 p.m., ate supper with his mother and siblings, and then read from various periodicals and newspapers until bedtime at 8:00 p.m.

In all the years that I was around him, he never took second helpings at meals, regardless of the quality of the food. He loved potatoes and creamed vegetables, and because of that, our noon meal usually included a creamed vegetable. he did not converse as he ate, so conversation at the noon dinner table was quite sparse. He also moved strawberries and watermelon, and during those years that we lived on the farm, there were strawberry and watermelon patches planted by him.

To back up a bit, I must relate a story of Uncle Carl’s romantic endeavors, as related to me by his brother Lawrence. One day as a young man on the farm, Carl told brother Lawrence that he was going to hitch up the horse and buggy and go to a farmstead about two miles east to ask a young farm girl for her hand in marriage. Lawrence, being a little more “versed” in the ways of the world, tried to dissuade him, telling him that it would be more proper to court the young lady for a time before making so bold a step. But, as I have often found out, Uncle Carl was of a very set mind, and so he proceeded on his “mission.” Unfortunately for him, the lady in question had already accepted a proposal from another young man. As far as any of the family know, this was his one and only romantic venture. He must have been observing the lady from a distance for some time, and bravely made this attempt at finding a wife. He remained a bachelor all of his life, and perhaps this contributed to his “set ways” and even eccentricity at times.

Needless to say, if the young lady had been available and had consented to marry Uncle Carl, the Clarence Strand family history would have been greatly changed. Uncle Carl would have no doubt ended up on the family farm, had a family of cousins for us, and the farm might still be in the Peterson family. Life is full of “what ifs” and if this even would have taken place, I would not be writing this story of Uncle Carl’s life.

As I looked through old yearbooks of Zion Lutheran Church where Uncle Carl was a member, it is noted that at various time he was a Sunday School teacher, and also a Deacon. In the years that I remember him, he was a faithful participant in the Sunday morning worship. He sat with his mother and sister in the third pew from the front on the right hand side of the church every Sunday. He never looked at the pastor during sermon time. His stewardship to the local congregation and the church at large was very generous. I can remember one time in the years coming out of the Depression, when he was asked to give a stewardship talk to the congregation. He calmly stated at the beginning of his talk that the ushers should stand at the back doors of the sanctuary and not let anyone leave. Needless to say, he had the attention of the congregation. I do recall sitting next to my mother as he asked the ushers to allow no one to leave. Her expression indicated that even she did not know what to expect from her older brother. Whether or not the message helped the congregation’s stewardship, I do not know. I do know that because of him and others, the stewardship of Zion congregation has beenm and continues to be very good.

In regard to his clothing and how he dressed, he had some very definite ideas. His work clothes were basically striped overalls, blue work shirts, and assorted jackets and sweaters. He would many times wear two pairs of overalls, the top pair being what he called “greasers” and they were just that! As winter approached, he had a layered look of jackets and sweaters, and as really cold weather began, he was a heavy tan mackinaw. In the summer, his head gear was a sun helmet and in the winter, a black leather cap with ear flaps. In the summer he wore no underwear, and in the winter he wore the typical “long-johns.”

The idea of tight-fitting clothes was anathema to him. As he grew older, this became more pronounced, and as I went several times with him to buy clothes, it seemed ludicrous. His dress shirt collars were at least two sizes too big, his trousers for his 32”–34” waist were purchased at size 40”. He never wore a belt so suspenders were absolutely necessary to keep his pants from falling down. And even with his shoes, the size that he chose were at least two sizes too big. But for all of this “looseness,” he never seemed to be ill dressed.

As years went by, he had various forays to doctors and hospitals, I accompanied him on many of these trips and tried to be as sympathetic to his complaints as I could be. He was quite hearing impaired as years progressed, and a trip to a hearing aid specialist was not very rewarding. He was convinced that hearing aid would restore his hearing to full hearing. He was finally convinced that this could not be true, but not before giving several specialists a very difficult time. I once accompanied him to an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist for trouble with his throat. I frankly thought that he would die in the chair as the doctor probed his throat. At one time he was in the hospital for much the same problem. After about a week stay without much help, he was highly disturbed because all that they did for him was to give him some aspirin. I can still see him in the hospital bed with his nightcap on. Since he was quite bald, in later years he wore this cap at night to keep his head warm. He slept in the unheated sleeping porch in the Peterson home, except in the very coldest of weather. And he needed the stocking cap for sleeping there.