I was ll years old in 1949 when we got electricity on the farm. We were so excited. Our older brothers and sisters had bought Mother a new Sunbeam mix-master. Mother was looking forward to using it. One summer day, Mother and Daddy had gone to town and the electricity came on. We ran all over the house turning on lights, then out to the smoke house and cellar to see if the lights worked. They all worked great. Then we ran out to the barn and tried all those lights. Everything worked fine. We were so thrilled! Cleo baked a cake and used Mother’s new mixer. When Mother got home she was so upset. She wanted to be the first one to use the mixer. The cake was good though. I didn’t have to fill coal oil lamps anymore after that. Electricity really changed our lives. Our older siblings bought us a radio and electric iron and refrigerator. We were “up town” now!! Every piece of laundry that was washed –we had to iron. Even the rags. Before electricity, we stood by the stove, summer and winter, so we could always keep a spare iron getting hot on the cook stove.
electricity
Uncle Vernon’s Story (part 17)
First Bud went into the service, then later Felix, after the war ended I was drafted on April 19, 1946 and I was a military policeman in Tokyo, Japan at the war crimes trials at the International Military Tribunal Far East. I was discharged on October 4, 1947 from California. [Since] the war [was alread] over, my time in the Army was more like a vacation compared to my life on the farm. The day after I got home I was 21 years old.
In January of 1948 I went to St. Louis to work. While home that was the time that REA was building the electric lines in the area and the right of way had to be cleared. Uncle Henry Heymeyer was in charge for the REA and he couldn’t get anyone to take the contract to clear the right of way, so Oscar Goetz took it with the provision that each family that got electricity would help and that when we worked on one farm we ate lunch on that farm. I think we started clearing on the Ted Englebrecht farm and went past the Bob Bruley creek a way. Oscar Goetz did not keep any money. He was the time keeper. The pay was divided up according to how many hours one worked on the project.
Daddy and I helped Oscar Goetz build a tobacco barn one year. I happened to be home one year from St. Louis when the new silo was built. That was quite an experience. I stayed with Bud and Alma in St. Louis until April15, 1949 when Bud and Alma purchased the Ivan place that we lived at around 1930. I then went into a boarding house where I lived until I got married on February 2, 1952. We then lived on Tower Grove across the street from Shaw’s Garden in south St. Louis.
Uncle Vernon’s Story (part 14)
Before we left Selma’s place electricity was installed in the house, but when we got to the next place (Stressnor – the 7th place) we were again without electricity until after WWII, about the spring of 1948. In the summer of 1941, Daddy and I cut logs on the Hemeyer place. The idea was that we cut enough logs (lumber) to make two silos, one for us and one for uncle Henry. We built Uncle Henry’s silo, but didn’t have enough lumber left to build another one, so we were without a silo for several years. We built a silo at Schubert also and tore it down and took the lumber along to Selma’s place, but never got around to reassembling it.
The silo we later built on the Stroessnor place was much larger, 28 ft tall. Beatrice and I both helped build that one. I had corn out on Selma’s place, Uncle Henry’s place, and also on the Uncle George Miller place, plus 17 acres on the Stressnor place that we took care of. That marked the end of my formal education. I was 15 that fall and they had a birthday party for me.
Margie was more fortunate than I. she got to finish high school at Eugene. The war with Europe and Japan started that fall. It became hard to get gas to market products in Jefferson City like we did at Schubert, so we sold our milk in the bulk to the Kraft cheese factory in Eldon.
Daddy read some article about genetic engineering done in Germany for the purpose of producing female offspring and I on occasion had to go to the drug store in Jefferson City to purchase this product. One time they asked me what it was being used for and of course I couldn’t tell them. The purpose was to produce heifer calves instead of bull calves. Normally they are more male calves than female calves, so I think it may have worked.
Aunt Naomi’s Story (part 11)
[Editor’s Note: Aunt Naomi didn’t really split things into parts. I’ve done that to make them more or less the right size for posts, and so that we could comment about them as we go along. However, this does mark the point in the story that AUnt Naomi calls “Chapter 1”.]
When I was about 5 or 6 years old, the REA (Rural Electric Association) came to our community and we had our house “wired” so we could be modern and have electricity. This was a very exciting time. Everyone was talking about how the house was going to be “wired.”
No one ever explained anything to me… so every evening when I came home from school I would run up to the house and look for the wire that would be wound around it. I didn’t know it would be inside the walls! Nobody ever told me anything. I spent most of my life feeling stupid!!! There was a lot of thin copper wired left lying around the electric poles that were installed on the farm. The wires had a rubber coating on them, but Mahlon showed us how to peel the coating off to get to the copper wire. He showed us how to bend and shape these to write our names and wear as pins.
When we learned that there was such a thing as a “shower” we decided we should have one, so in our countrified way, we made one (only in summer). We had a bucket that was used to feed the newborn calves. It had a large rubber nipple on it. We filled the bucket with water, hung it in a tree in a secluded place and let the water stream down on us from the nipple. I think we also used old buckets with holes. This worked just fine and we were perfectly happy with our shower and our homemade lye soap.
Aunt Naomi’s Story (part 7)
We would occasionally “pike” on the telephone. This is when you know someone is talking and you gently pick up the receiver hoping they won’t hear the click and invade their privacy by listening to what they are saying. Our ring on the country party line was long, short, long. Each family had a distinctive ring of their own. Central was located in Brazito. Spinster sisters manned the switchboard. They put the long distance calls through.
Attic beads – they were like finding treasure! We picked them up and made bracelets out of them by stringing them with a needle and thread. We had to be careful not to step through the attic floor – we would have ended up in the kitchen below.
After we got electricity, Mother got a Mixmaster. It came with a set of two bowls. I accidentally broke the larger bowl. I really felt bad because I know how much mother loved her mixer. We were able to replace it later on.
Under the stairs in our house was a scary place. Occasionally one of us locked the other under the steps. It was fun to hear the person scream but not to be the one locked in. Same with the outhouse!