On the Farm

The home place was on the Wilson County side of the Wilson/Neosho County Kansas line. At the time we lived there, it was bordered on the South by a very busy highway which has since been moved two miles north leaving the road in front of the home place the distinction of being a secondary country lane. Even though we were next to Neosho County it always seemed a little more urbane than Wilson County. I guess it was because Chanute was in Neosho County and farming was in Wilson County.

I don’t know who built the house. It was lived in by four generations of Goltry’s, starting with my great grandfather. There was another farm house about a quarter mile north of the home place, Dad tells me he lived there from the age of two, about 1924, to age 14. At that time my Grandpa Goltry moved his family into the home place.

The house had three bedrooms upstairs. Downstairs was the kitchen, living room, a parlor that Mom and Dad used as a bedroom and a bedroom which all three of us kids used when we first lived there.

Grandma Goltry occupied the top floor. She sat every day in her rocking chair next to the window reading her bible. Dad says Grandma Goltry was a wonderful person, very kind and gentle which is the way I remember her. She passed away when I was about ten years old.

Grandpa Goltry died when I was quite young, I don’t remember him at all. His family was so poor they farmed Grandpa out to a family named Cook. I have heard my dad mention Granddad Cook on many occasions. The Cooks lived on the farm north of the home place, the same place where Grandpa Goltry had his family for about twelve years.

In about 1955 our family moved to another farm about five miles southwest of the home place. About a year later Grandma Goltry passed away and we returned to the Goltry family farm. My brother Rod and I occupied the room that Grandma had used for a kitchen/sitting room. Our sister Linda used the same bedroom that Grandma had used. Dad converted the bedroom we kids had earlier occupied downstairs into a bathroom. Wow, indoor plumbing, no more going to the out house on cold winter nights.

There was a third bedroom upstairs that remained vacant for several years until I decided I wanted it for myself. Mom helped me fix it up so it was my room. We had not used it before because it was the coldest room in the house; it was on the north side. There was no insulation and it was not uncommon to wake up on a cold winter morning with ice on the inside of the windows.

The house was heated with a Warm Morning wood stove in the living room. We usually grabbed our clothes on cold mornings and dressed by the stove. There were a couple of vents through the floor to the ceiling on the first floor but the north room had none, I guess that is why it remained unheated. Each winter Mom nailed plastic from the hardware store over the downstairs windows, kind of a poor man’s storm window. The upstairs windows could not be easily reached so they remained uncovered.

We knew nothing about air conditioning. I remember a couple of hot summer nights when it was too warm in the house to sleep so we all took our blankets outside and slept on the hay rack looking up at the stars. Later Dad brought home a water cooler, a device that circulated water over a fibrous material that covered three sides of the cooler. Air was sucked in through this material by a squirrel cage fan and blown into the house. This evaporation provided cooling through the east kitchen window. Felt pretty good.

The only trees in the yard were about a half dozen cedars. Kind of ugly but not much fun to climb. The sap would get all over your hands and nothing could wash it off. They provided wonderful shade though, especially on those hot Kansas summer days. It was fun to lie on the grass under the trees and let the gentle summer breeze flow over you. Lemonade tasted wonderful in the shade of those trees.

We had a large patch of iris in the north eastern corner of the yard. We had iris of all colors and shades. Each year Mom would invite us kids to help her pull the grass out of the iris. I hate iris to this day.

There was a honeysuckle bush growing up over the screens of the front porch so that when the wind blew in from the south, the smell of honeysuckle permeated the house. We rarely used this porch, the main entrance was our back porch. We later enclosed the front porch with windows and build a brick sidewalk to it from the main sidewalk that went to the back porch. Mom wanted everyone to start entering through the front which led to the living room, but as I recall all our family and friends continued using the back porch and entered the house through the kitchen.

We got drinking water from a well out in the pasture. Originally our only running water in the house was the cold water spigot in the kitchen sink. Our bath water was heated on the gas kitchen range then poured into the bathtub which was set in the middle of the kitchen floor. It was always nice to be the first to use the bath water.

We raised rabbits to sell and ate a lot of them ourselves. I once came running into the house after visiting the rabbit hutches yelling to Mom that there were baby mice in with one of the rabbits. She explained that those were baby rabbits. That is when I learned that there is no such thing as just two rabbits.

Our sandbox was right next to the iris patch. We spent many hours making roads and towns and then driving on them with our cars. We made a lot of our sandbox toys. We used some of Dad’s tools to make tractors and plows. We would then get the sand wet and plow our fields. The wheels for the tractors came from store bought toy tractors which eventually wore out. The plows were made from tin cans.

The garden was to the north of the yard. Each year we would plant sweet corn, green beans, onions and radishes along with others I cannot remember. One section of the garden was planted in strawberries which provided us with that wonderful fruit year after year. Mom would use a pressure cooker to can the corn and beans for consumption during the winter. In the corner of the garden was a pear tree. Not much of one but a pear tree. Once in a while we would get a few pears off of it and eat them right there.

The field to the east of the house was usually rented out to the neighbor who planted wheat and once in a while we got to ride in the trailer while he harvested it. Then a gas company put a pipeline through the middle of the field. In order to build the pipeline it was necessary to blast through the rock which was not far under the topsoil. We picked up rocks every weekend forever.

Our barn was a large red wooden structure. It had stalls for about 6 cows for milking but the most I ever saw used was two. There was a large area used for storing hay, not a hay loft but a large area from the cement floor up. There was an area elevated above all else, accessed by a ladder. It was lined with some kind of galvanized metal. I assume the metal was to keep mice and rats out of the grain stored up there. I never saw anything up there other than my brother, sister and myself. Rod and I would on a rare occasion find some corn tassels, wrap them up in corn husks like a cigarette and smoke them. They weren’t very good. We are lucky we didn’t burn the barn down. On other days we would jump from the highest small window to the rocks below, was a wonder we didn’t shatter our ankles.

Our cousin Lyle visited one day and brought his BB gun. Lyle, Rod, and I went to the barn and had a BB gun fight. We were lucky none of us hit the other, ever. Poor aim and chicken spirits that hid behind bales of hay saved us from the pain of a BB strike.

Most of the time we had a Guernsey for milk. Dad milked her until Rod and I were old enough then he bought a Holstein so that each of us had a cow to milk and Dad stayed in the house. Each morning and evening we would trudge out to the barn and milk the cows. Rod took the Guernsey, I the Holstein. He was on the other side of my cow so I could squirt him once in a while. The cows always walked to the same stalls, I guess they just knew where they were supposed to be. We always had barn cats and we would try to squirt them in the mouth. They didn’t seem to mind our bad aim. We had an old sprayer that we used on the cows before milking them. It had some kind of liquid in it that killed the flies on contact. This saved a lot of slaps in the face from the cow’s tail. Milking always looked like fun when Dad did it. It wasn’t much fun once I had to do it twice a day.

What we called the garage was more a work shop. Dad had all his tools and a welder in there. I don’t recall ever seeing a car parked in the garage. We used to throw a softball over the garage to play “Anty Over”. There was a basketball goal mounted near the top of the front of the garage where we played for hours even though our court was the gravel driveway. The roof of the garage was made of galvanized steel with a sharp edge on each side of the backboard. We went through many a basketball whenever our aim was off, which was often, and the ball was sliced open on the sharp edge.

The driveway was circular with a water well and old hand pump in the center. The water wasn’t good for drinking but it certainly felt cool on a hot summer day.

At one time the yard was fenced but during a 4-H project we pulled it all up and Mom mowed our yard which was huge. She not only mowed the yard but the ditches too. She would come in for supper at night after mowing and sit down on one of the benches we had at the table and proceed to pass out from too much heat. Scared us to death, we thought she had died.

Mom had some flowers in a bed near the back door. She had trouble understanding why they would not grow well in that location until she learned that Rod and I were afraid to go all the way to the out house in the dark.

It seemed like we had a lot of snow back then, a lot more than we do today. It would frequently get up to our knees whereas today we rarely have a snowfall that will be above the ankles. Then again, when you are three feet tall it doesn’t have to be very deep to come up to one’s knees. We would build snow men and forts of snow. We worked furiously gathering snowballs for ammunition. After the ammo was gone we would gather more and go at it again and again. After a while we would tire of the game and destroy each others forts and the game would be over. Time to go to the house, take off the wet boots and mittens and warm up.

At the north edge of the eighty acres was a small pond. Dad took us fishing there on many an occasion. We would catch catfish and blue gills. Usually we used worms as bait or an occasional unlucky grasshopper. There were a number of willow trees along the dam which was on the north side of the pond. We never swam in the pond, for some reason whenever we went swimming we went to the neighbors pond. They lived kitty-corner from the home place. That is where Dad taught us to swim. It was a little bigger than our own. We did learn to ice skate on our pond in our rubber boots in the winter.

There was a meadow in the North West corner of the home place, probably about twenty acres in size. Rarely did we go there except in the summer to bale hay. On those days it was always hot. Rabbits would come running out of the tall grass ahead of the mower. By the time the baler came around the rabbits had found a new home elsewhere, probably in the hedge row that ran along the north and west edges of the meadow.

On a rare occasion we would walk out to the meadow but it seemed so far removed from the house. Once, in a childish snit, I decided I was going to run away from home. I made it as far as the meadow and for whatever reason turned around and went home. No one even knew I was gone.

The first television we had was a black and white. Back then they were all black and white. The picture was very snowy, sometimes impossible to see. We had our favorite shows, Tales of the Texas Rangers was tops. Rod and I would do our best to imitate them using garden hoes for horses with belts for reins. We tied them up to the hitching rail which doubled as a shoe scraper. With our straw cowboy hats and Roy Rogers guns, one on each side, we probably were quite a sight. Another favorite TV show was Howdy Doody with Buffalo Bob and Clarabell the clown. Howdy had a cute little puppet friend named Dilly Dally. He was my favorite. Howdy Doody first aired the day I was born. I didn’t know there was TV before I was born.

Summer seemed to last forever back then. It was different than now, we had four months off during the summer. This was a hold over from earlier times and allowed the kids to help out on the farm during the active months. We played for hours. We had plastic cowboys and Indians, horses and corrals.

We had a good childhood, Mom was at home with us most of the time. Only when we got older did she go to work. We helped around the farm doing chores. We always had a cow for milk and chickens for eggs. Mom separated the milk and cream and sold some of it. She also made home made butter which was white and she colored it with a yellow powder so it didn’t look like lard. She also made homemade cottage cheese, it was yucky. We never needed anything, everything we needed was provided by our parents. We didn’t always have what we wanted but we never needed anything.

As children we always looked forward to Christmas on the farm, that was a special time of year. Once we popped corn and strung it on thread for a garland on the tree. We awoke the following morning to corn crumbs left behind by mice. The only Christmas that wasn’t any fun was the one that we found all our Christmas presents while Mom and Dad were gone one day. There were no surprises and we felt rotten.

Mom made Rod and I hand puppets using the tube from a roll of toilet paper and cloth. Mine was named Jim. Jim and I spent hours together, he was my best friend. I still have Jim.  He sits in my office watching as I write, read, and generally piddle.  Mom also made Linda a doll house out of orange crates and papered the walls with fabric pictures from the Wards catalog.

My first bicycle was a small belt driven device. Someone probably gave it to us. By then Rod and Linda had their bikes, nice shiny bikes with 24 inch wheels. Rod’s was red, Linda’s was blue. Later I got mine, a nice shiny red one. We rode the heck out of those bikes, first on the farm then later to school. When Rod and I got our first job at a greyhound farm we would ride them to work on Saturday mornings.

It has been over fifty years since we moved off the home place and I have no idea what the neighbors call it now, but in my heart it will always be the Goltry place. Contained within the four walls of that house and in the eighty acres it sits on are a lifetime of memories of childhood. We enjoyed long summers, shade trees, Christmas, and all the normal memories of childhood. It was a good lesson for all three of us. To the rest of the world it looks just like any other old farm house on a rural road. To me it looks like home.