Dad and Farming

I recall talking to Dad about working – rather a serious conversation for me and Dad to be having. It was after I was married and Kate had been born but before Kellie, so that would make it 1975.

We were standing on the west side of the house in Union looking at the garage Dad had built. The conversation turned to his work life. I asked him how it had felt driving back east during that summer when he was away. He asked if I was thinking about being a driver, and I told him that no, I had no such desire. But I did want to find out what it was like.

He told me it was lonely, but that he had seen quite a few nice places. He spoke with great fondness about how pretty the countryside was in the Midwest. He had seen many farms that he would have liked to have purchased. This came as something of a surprise to me.

He told me that all he had wanted to do as far as work was concerned was to be a farmer. Everything else that he did – the work in the mine, the work in the smelter, working for Brady-Milne, driving for Acme Building Products, driving for A & L Concrete, driving back east – was merely to make ends meet. These weren’t what he wanted to do with his life. What he wanted to do was farm.

He and Mom lived and farmed with Grandma and Grandpa Rees the year (1949) after they were first married. I hadn’t come along yet, so this isn’t a memory, but something I was told. (That time period is where the Walt Brady sugar beet story comes from, by the way.) But after that summer it was clear that having two families on the farm in Draper wasn’t going to work. So Dad went back to working in the lead mine in Lark. Then I cam along, and pretty soon Joe, Darrel, and Robyn also arrived. So Dad had quite a few responsibilities, and he stepped up to them and went on with life. Then when Craig, Keven, and Connie came, his plate was really full!

While he was going to Jordan High School, he took agriculture (“ag”) classes. He told me (in a different conversation), that he would come home after class and tell his brothers and father that they should be raising tomatoes and cucumbers and the like. He was laughed at. His brothers told him that the land was too poor to raise such crops and that alfalfa and sugar beets were the best crops that could be raised on that 40 acre piece.

I remembered that Dad would wait until after all of us were in bed. Then he would take down an ag book that he had, and he would read. I know this because I sometimes would get up for a drink of water and see him reading the book at the kitchen table. When 10:00 PM would roll around, he would demand quiet. He listened to the news, but the ag report was something to which he paid particular attention.

When Dad had to leave his job with A & L Concrete, I suppose many people thought it was the end of his world. No doubt it was a blow. No one wants to be blinded, and know the difficulties that brings. But he and Mom were now free to go to the farm. He enjoyed working the farm. He was almost gleeful when he told me about his first vegetable stand. He sold tomatoes and cucumbers from that stand, and he enjoyed telling me how that he “rubbed it in” to his brothers by telling them about how successful his truck farm was becoming. He was lucky that he lived long enough (and that his brothers lived long enough, as well) for this to happen.

Growing up, we worked the tiny garden plot he had on the half-acre piece in Union. We learned quite a few things from Dad and Mom doing that. I wonder how different our life would have been if he and Mom had been able to settle down on a farm.