My parents taught me the value of work. Early on they taught me
the Bible verse: “If any would not work, neither should he eat!” In summer we lived by
Dad’s mantra “In the field by sunup!” And they practiced what they preached.
Dad was principal of the school, taught grades four through eight, and was
church organist and choir director. He taught a Sunday morning Bible class and
was the adult counselor for the youth group named The Walther League. He also
cleaned the church and saw to it that hymn numbers were posted for Sunday
worship. Before and/or after school he raised nine kids. Beyond his family and
the local congregation he served for many years as Chair of The Texas District
Teachers Conference and organized the annual statewide conference.
Mom, of course, washed diapers continually, served three hot meals
a day, did hundreds of loads of laundry (always carrying the hot water in
buckets to the washing machine.) She used the hand-turned clothes wringer
before hanging the laundry on the drying line, taking them down when dry. Dad
always wore ironed shorts; the girls wore homemade dresses sewn by Mom (often
made from the material of flour sacks et sim.) She cared for the sick, always
saw to it that “the beds were made”, canned up to 800 quarts of home fruits and
vegetables in one year. And still made time to hear our daily recitation of
Bible verses and catechism lesson.
Within that context my work was pretty simple. Of course, I milked
the cows, gathered the eggs, and watered the hogs. We shucked an awful lot of
corn, sometime made less tiresome when my sibs and I would have contests to see
who could get 100 ears shucked first.
My memory is that I was forever pushing a lawnmower. Mom’s idea of
the expanse of our lawn (our house abutted a major pasture) kept expanding. By
the fifth grade I was busy mowing for my relatives. Uncle Walter wanted to be
helpful. He was a very clever blacksmith so he rigged up an electric motor on
top of the lawn mower blades. Big problem: Before I had cut even a tenth of his
lawn I had run over the electric cord. I hastily repaired it with “black tape”
only to run over and cut the extension cord at another place. My cousin Olga
had what seemed to me to be an acre of front lawn, and try as I might I never cut
the mowing path as straight as she liked and so had to recut the lawn in 100
degree heat.
It was obvious early on that this boy would never make it on the
farm and this just got proven again when I was sent to pick cotton. My younger
brother Harold and my elder sister Leona both out-picked me, and remember that
we were paid by the pound picked, thirty-five cents for a hundred pounds. On a
really good day if I picked from sun-up to sundown I might hit that 100 pounds
and earn my 35 cents. My sibs could double that!
My most enjoyable little job may have been digging for worms that
Uncle Otto used for bait when he went to the lake for perch. He would slip us a
full nickel when we had a good pint-sized can full of wriggly worms waiting for
him. What I remember most vividly is not the nickel but a near disaster. We
moved a small water tank to get to the moist ground underneath. It was full of
wriggly worms. I hoisted the heavy grubbing axe above my head to really get
into the earth. Just then brother Harold spotted a worm in the middle of my
target. He ran to grab it. Angels descended from above, averted the swing of my
digging axe which would have shattered his skill. We got the worms and shared
the nickel.
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