Ben L. Staponski (1922-1996) grew up “at the Tee” in Pulaskifield. The following essay was written by him in the 1980’s or 1990’s. It provides a wonderful glimpse into the life of a kid growing up Polish:
LIFE ON THE FARM
As I recollect the way of life on the farm in the years beginning in 1927-28, I remember the first car purchased by my father — a 1924 Model T Ford used to go to church in Monett and haul strawberries to Monett in season. The Model T was not used all that much because gasoline prices were high — $.10 a gallon and kerosene was $.04 a gallon.
Mules and horses were the farm power at this age. At this time I was introduced to use a sulky plow with three horses to plow corn, wheat and oat fields for our crops. We fed our crops to a few milk cows to sell milk to Carnation for income, which was very scarce, and fed hogs, chickens, ducks and geese–which was our meat supply for the year. Some animals were butchered on a daily basis because of no refrigeration, no electricity, no power of any kind except horse power and human power.
There was no phone, no radio, and no TV. Communication at that time was by word of mouth or an occasional newspaper if you could read or afford one. We didn’t write many letters because of the expense of an envelope and 1 cent stamp. The cheaper postcard was popular then. The church bell would ring at St. Peter Paul in Bricefield to communicate the time — 6 a.m. — 12 noon — 6 p.m. The bell would take on a different tone when someone died in the parish. This tone was a signal to walk from neighbor to neighbor until you found out who died and when the wake and funeral were so we could attend.
The bank failure and depression were beginning at about this time. You gauge a farmer’s wealth by a good pair of matching mules or how many cans of milk he shipped daily or how good were his mule harnesses. A good pair of mules sold for $500 before the depression. Coolidge was president, which I don’t remember very well, but I do remember beginning with the Hoover presidency and the depression in 1929, 30, 31, and 32. Banks closed, stock markets crashed, people committed suicide everywhere because of the losses they suffered on their investments. I remember my father’s savings loss in Pierce City bank that closed. Early 1930 was the beginning of the “Terrible Depression” era. Everyone worked hard to survive. We were all poor but didn’t know it because we were all in the same boat — no welfare, no handouts. We all looked out for each other and shared food, clothing, work, animals, equipment, etc. The sick were attended to by a neighborhood lady who might have knowledge from experience — how to deliver babies, lance a boil, splint broken arm, leg or ankle. Turpentine, lard, certain leaves, roots and even cow manure were used for medication. We were poorly dressed and lacked many things but shared everything and had plenty
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of food — food you didn’t always like but good enough to survive. There were very few doctors but they were hard to afford because of no money. The doctors had heart. They would treat us for free or on the job and they would come to your house in emergencies or you would pick them up in a horse-drawn wagon, a hack or Model T and return them to their office.The fall season was the beginning of “neighbor hog butchering”. One hog was butchered by your neighbors and divided by a quarter each in order to have fresh meat. This trade occurred 2 or 3 weeks apart until all four butchered one hog apiece. February was the time for the big slaughter party by the same group of neighbors, only this time they would slaughter 2, 3, or 4 hogs, depending on the size of the family and this time you did not share meat. This time we shared labor and the meat was preserved for the summer months by smoking, pickling, salting and frying down into crocks or canned into jars. All the above functions turned into an evening party — wine, a good meal, lots of talk, storytelling, some lies and ended with a hot game of pitch by the kerosene lamp and a hot wood stove. This continued until all neighbors completed their spring butchering.
During this same period there was an abundance of wild game: cotton tails, jack rabbits, squirrels, quail. With a good snow it was no problem for my friend and I to kill 100 rabbits in a day, clean them, and hang them on the clothesline in the fur to freeze for later use by neighbors and sell to buyers for 2 or 3 cents apiece, if there was a market for them. The hunting was done with clubs. We did not use guns — we could not afford the ammunition. My friend and I had ordered rifles from Sears and Roebuck with strawberry-picking money at $3.50 each, but we didn’t have money to buy shells at 15 cents a box or 2 for 25 cents — 22 shots Kleenbore bound or Super X. Much of the rabbit meat was ground with pork into hamburger to eat until we got tired of it. I had 15 steel traps to trap fur animals; skunks and opossums stretched on boards and sold to fur buyers in season. We also had trained dogs to hunt fur animals to make a little cash. My father always had excellent trained dogs and he was a very good hunter. I remember he sold $700.00 worth of furs to Taylor and Smith Fur Co. one year. Furs were a good price and he had a lot of pelts. I also had 25 rabbit traps to trap live rabbits and sell to the milk man at 5 or 10 cents a rabbit. That was big money then when we had none. My rabbit traps were made from used lumber picked up from the banks of Hudson Creek after the flood rains. Nails and staples were reused because we had no new nails.
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Strings from wheat bundles and straw stacks and tin from canned goods was used as material for construction of the trap plus bailing wire for some parts.
Everything we did was hard work. We had no modern conveniences. We walked to sister school in Bricefield about 5 miles or more round trip with a heavy satchel full of books in all kinds of weather; we would get tired but we were also in condition, mentally and physically, and we knew nothing else. Sisters taught 50 and 60 students in class; 2 sisters, 4 grades each, Polish and English classes. What hard work for both sisters and students but we were happy. There were times I made 2 trips to Bricefield. One to go to school and one to serve at alter during Lent. Sometimes we drove the Model T, later the 1926 Chevy sedan — 4 cylinder. There were also fun times when 20 or 25 of us students would walk to and from school as a group. We would sing as a group, holler, argue, fight, throw rocks at mail boxes and telephone poles, if there was a phone line pole. We’d hit the one wire on the pole with a rock and listen to the wire buzz if it didn’t break. I carried my lunch in a half or gallon pail. Mom would get up early, butcher a fryer for lunch — again no refrigerator to preserve meat — fry it down that same day. We ate well. No store-bought food. All food was prepared by my parents except coffee and sugar. Everything else was farm-raised.
We youngsters entertained ourselves with our own crude games. We played hockey in winter months on the frozen creek. A gang would choose up sides and use a tin can for a puck. Everyone had their own favorite stick or club; usually a small sapling from a fence row with a root on the big end properly shaved down with an ax to fit your hands. We would skate in our work shoes. We had no skates. We didn’t know there were skates. Our parents frowned on this game because of cuts, bruises, and sprained ankles. Our other winter activity was skiing. Homemade skis were made from horse-drawn buggy top supports and hardwood cut into 18-inch lengths and nailed to an old pair of shoes. We removed the heal of the shoe to make a flat surface and nailed the ski from the inside of the shoe and padded the inside of the shoe for comfort. We skied the country roads in the milkman’s frozen tire tracks. We could glide for miles with little effort at a high speed to make the next hill. There was no traffic in those days so we had clear sailing.
Marble games were popular. If we had marbles we would gamble in a game called keepers. If someone had a ball bearing about the size of a marble,
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he was rich. The owner of a nice shiny ball bearing had class. We also would make a large fire in a dry ditch and shoot dice to the light of the fire on a burlap sack like the big boys did, but we would shoot for marbles, nails, .22 shells and occasionally a penny.Another game was to roll rubber car tires down the dry ditch to see who could bounce the tire the highest over the rocks or tie a tire to a large grape vine in the timber to see who could swing the highest or make wooden guns with rubber inner tubes that would shoot large rubber bands and play gangsters. Corn cob fights were popular. We would choose up sides and the side which was injured the most would give in. This way we determined the winner.
Many of the ideas came from the Sears catalog. We would thumb through the pages for hours to come up with some game or tool. We made our own pinball machine from window parts, washboard parts, old springs and bailing wire and marbles, etc. I made my own walnut peeler with an old metal wheel with attached lugs to turn through a wooden trough with water in it to knock off the peeling and wash the walnut in the same operation.
The adults gathered into groups for their recreation. The women had sewing parties — quilts, dresses, and slips were made from bleached white feed sacks as well as bed sheets, pillow cases, dish towels and many other items. Menfolk played cards. Pitch was a popular game by the kerosene lamps or a group would get together and make harnesses and horse collars once every two weeks. My father would give hair cuts some nights to the neighborhood at no charge. The group did chip in and buy the hand clippers, comb and scissors. The group would make at least one feather bed for someone in the group from feathers saved from ducks and geese. Several times a year there would be a square dance. They would take turns to have the dancing. They would move out the living room furniture, roll up the rug, have a local fiddler, banjo and guitar player and have a ball. Each square dance cost the couple 10 cents to pay the music makers $1.50 each. There were refreshments like coffee, wine, homemade liquor, homemade beer, cookies, pies, cakes and sandwiches. Sometimes a skirmish occurred when a stranger got out of line. By 1:00 a.m. the dance would end. All would pitch in and put the place back together and go home.
Fall months was plowing time to prepare the ground for fall and spring planting. In October we sowed winter wheat to be harvested the following June and July. Corn, oats and like crops were planted in March and April.
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No fertilizer was used. Either it was not available or we couldn’t afford it; therefore, the crop yields were very poor. Twenty bushel an acre wheat was about the average. All this acreage was maintained by human and horse power. Wheat harvest was done with horse-drawn benders, cut into bundles, stacked into shock. Again the neighborhood would form a thrashing run and hire a steam engine and thrashing machine and crew who would go from farm to farm and thrash wheat, barley, and oats. Eight or 10 farmers in the group would furnish all manpower, wagons, and grain sacks and put the grain in the farmer’s barn or grainery. Each farmer would pay the threshing crew with the equipment at the end of the thrashing run, which lasted about 2 weeks depending on the weather. The cost was about 6-7 cents a bushel. Each farmer furnished dinners and lunches and a water boy on a horse to take water to the pitchers of bundles in the field. The farmer also furnished the water for the steam engine and wood cut to certain lengths for the fire box. The bundle pitchers in the field received 15 cents per hundred bushel trashed. The hauler with the wagon and team and himself received 25 cents per hundred bushel. Amount of grain trashed on an average amounted to 7 to 8 hundred bushel of all grain per farmer. There was very little cash at this time so labor, equipment, food, etc. was on a trade basis — I will help you now and you help me later — with no money exchanged, only labor.
Woodcutting was done on pretty much the same basis. A timber was a valuable asset in those days. Each farmer owned a few acres of timber to make wood for heat, cook stove and fence posts. We would make wood in the winter months regardless how cold it was. We would go to the timber early in the morning with a team of horses and wagon with a packed lunch and a large fire for warming ourselves and our lunches. We cut wood with a cris-cut-saw (2 man), axes, maul and wedges. We cut enough wood and split the large logs to load on a wagon bringing the load home that evening and unloading on a pile. This was repeated until the pile was big enough for about 1 year supply. Again the farmers would form a wood run, hire someone with a circle saw outfit powered by a Model T engine and go from farmer to farmer, cut up the piles for their wood supply. The manpower was needed to carry the logs to the machine. About 6 to 7 men was needed to be efficient. Again the host farmer and his wife and neighbor ladies would prepare the midday lunches and supper for all.
There were many other things I could write about details of life on the farm in the late twenties and early thirties. Middle thirties was the beginning of high school for me. A group of us rode to school in Pierce City my first
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two years in a 1932 Chevy furnished by a local farmer at $1.50 a month — no buses to pick you up. School districts were too poor to have buses so transportation was up to each student to get his or her education. We traveled to basketball and football games and other functions in cattle trucks or a few cars furnished by ones who could afford it with no pay. Finally the school districts acquired a 1930 Chevy bus but it was broke down most of the time and there was no money to repair it. In 1937 two new Dodge buses were acquired and that is the way I got to school after walking two miles a day to catch it. In contrast, there must be a bus in every garage today with the amount of buses on the roads.I was starting, as we all were, to think about politics about this time. The Roosevelt Administration was elected in 1932 and new farm programs were put into effect, which helped the farmer. Work programs (WPA) were also put to use to help the poor and many other programs. Still there was no electric power on the farm until the REA Program was put into use in the early forties. I was asked to write about early times on the farm but I am getting too far into modern times now. World War II began about this time and the rest is modern history, which many remember.
Ben L. Staponski
