While we were probably lucky to live on a farm during the 1940s and the early ’50s, my sister and I didn’t always see it that way. Our life on a dairy farm was divided roughly into three main activities—school, chores and self-motivated entertainment.
School probably took up more hours than anything else, except sleep. And chores weren’t too far behind that.
Times were tough for our family back then. Dad worked nights on another job in the paper mill to supplement the farm income, which was primarily from our milk production and a few cash crops: cucumbers and beans. That’s largely what chores were all about. It was important to produce not only enough food for ourselves but also enough to sell in order to buy other necessary items.
I think that as kids, we didn’t recognize the importance of work to the economic life of the family. Thus, we sometimes resented being tied down to the jobs on the farm while our city friends were out having a good time. The regular chores (those done on a daily basis) included milking, feeding the livestock, hoeing potatoes, picking “pickles” and, in season, helping to make firewood.
On weekends we had to help with family laundry and house cleaning. As the seasons changed, so did the chores. In the spring, there was plowing and planting. In the summer we had to hoe, pull weeds, gather garden produce and help can it.
Fall meant helping to harvest the crops and store them in the haymows or silos. In the winter, I’d have to help my dad in the woods because of the constant demand for fire wood. (We had an old iron cookstove in the old log house and a wood-burning furnace in the “new” house.)
There were also the year-round chores, which included fence repairs and stall cleaning. The cows had to be turned out to pasture each morning and rounded up again at the end of the day. Milking the cows every morning and every night, every day of the year was the most demanding of all chores. It wasn’t something to be neglected because the cows’ output would either decline or cease entirely if they were not milked regularly.
Mornings were the worst when it came to milking. The cows had to be milked before we ate breakfast. Winters were particularly unsatisfactory since the days were short, which meant the cows were milked before it was daylight outside and again after dark. Dad used to say we worked “from can’t see to can’t see!”
On cold winter mornings, after stoking the furnace with a few big armloads of firewood, we’d bundle up and trudge out to the barn to do the milking. Sometimes we’d make our way to the barn by moonlight. While I got the cows fed, Dad would start the milking. Before we got the milking machine, milking was done by hand. I was never very fond of that. It was not fun to get that intimate with a cow!
The proper way to approach this unpleasant job, always from the cow’s right side, was to sit on a low stool, place the bucket on the floor, place your head in the cow’s flank, and milk two teats at one time, grasping and pulling, using each hand alternately. Not all cows were fond of being milked! Sometimes they’d kick or get their feet into the bucket. Their tails were lethal weapons, especially if they were matted with cockleburs or manure!
Once the milking was completed, I’d head back to the house for a shower (I didn’t want to go to school smelling like a cow!) and have a big breakfast before getting dressed and walking the quarter mile to the end of the lane to catch the bus for school.
After school, we changed back into our work clothes and headed out to do chores again! Then, before daylight the following day, it all started over again.
It was a hard life, but you know what? We learned a lot about the value of hard work and developed the discipline that led to our living successful lives. We also learned the valuable lesson of entertaining ourselves when we had the time. I don’t think we were ever bored as kids, and I’m never bored now. I always find ways to fill my time. I think growing up on the farm was a wonderful foundation for my life.
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