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.