There was a hydrant by the windmill, a faucet, and that was the best water ever. A tin cup hung there, but usually I just put my mouth under and drank. We filled the bucket for the chickens from the hydrant.
The windmill had a wooden frame tower and a platform with boards. One time I had the idea to climb up the windmill and sit on the platform next to the wheel. Mother came outside and saw me. She was so worried about me getting up there and falling down, or the windmill turning and knocking me off. She scared me with her fears, so I never tried that again.
That’s how it often was with Mother and Dad. She thought I’d get hurt, but Dad would just laugh and say, “Oh she’ll be alright.”
A wooden platform at the base of the windmill had a removable lid covering a pit about seven feet deep and four feet across that Dad climbed into occasionally to adjust something for the well. There was no water in the pit, it’s walls were brick, and you could see salamanders climbing around down there on the walls.
The milk house had a big separator. After Dad milked the cows, Mother took out enough for kitchen use and ran the rest of it through the separator to take the cream off. What was left, the skimmed milk, didn’t taste good, so that went to the pigs. We put cream in the churn and made butter. Sometimes in very hot weather we had to crank it a long time to get butter, and Mother and I would take turns churning. No one liked the milk left over after churning, the buttermilk, so the pigs got that, too. A five-gallon pail in the house, our slop bucket, held whatever we didn’t want and that went to the pigs.
When the milk cow had a calf, Dad weaned it after the first few weeks and put it in the barn away from the cows. If the mother cow fed her calf, there would be no milk left for us. We’d fill a glass bottle with milk, it was like a pop bottle, with no nipple on it, just open on the end. It was my job to take this bottle and feed the calf. He’d guzzle that right down.
One time I wanted roller skates. The only cement went from the back porch steps to the fence, or if you went to the side basement door, there was a sidewalk. That’s where I learned to roller skate. I learned to ice skate, too. I went down to the pond when it was frozen and skated around on that. Dad went down with me to get me started, but neither he nor Mother ever skated. One time we had an ice storm, and I could skate right out on the ground, out in our driveway.
I never had to get up early to do chores. Most farm children had to do a lot of work, farm boys would have to milk the cows and feed the animals early in the mornings, but I never had to do any of that.
I was spoiled. I had things my own way, all kinds of animals to play with, and my dad around all the time. I loved to be with my dad. I never thought of helping him as hard work.
Drinking from a windmill hydrant
Marker 25th wedding anniversary party
Chapter Seven:
The New Virginia Community
My father saw to it that we went to church every Sunday. Mother was Norwegian, and she’d just as soon go over to the Lutheran Church in the Norwegian community where she grew up. Her father, Hans Walstad, had helped organize that church, they even met in his home for awhile. Her mother, Sofie Walstad, was Ladies Aid president for years and years. That is where my parents were married
But Dad didn’t want to drive five miles to go there, you couldn’t go straight, you had to go around. This New Virginia Methodist Church was close, so that’s where we went.
For awhile, in the earlier years when I was small, the ministers would come out and people would invite them for dinner in their homes. Church lasted until twelve, and someone invited the minister and his wife to dinner afterward.
One Sunday Rev. Scofield was visiting at our house. Mother had chickens that had hatched and they were real tiny, so she had them behind the cookstove. I wanted to show Rev. Scofield the baby chickens so I picked one up, and he was real interested in them.
There was a Rev. Marshal who attended college in Hastings, and one time he brought a Chinese student to church. This Chinese student spoke to the congregation, and what I remember him saying is that it was hard to eat the rice cooked in this country because they put “too many waters in it.”
Rev. Marshal had a children’s time during church, when he’d have the children come up to the front. He’d tell us a story, sometimes using a chalkboard, and I always liked that. One minister had us sign a pledge not to smoke or to use alcohol, and I signed it. I was about twelve or thirteen, and later that influenced me.
I’d think, “I won’t do that because I signed a pledge.”
Rev. Bibb was the minister who talked to me, trying to get me to convince my dad to be baptized. None of the Markers were ever baptized. They weren’t very religious, and when they first came to Nebraska and the children were born, there wasn’t any church here back in the 1870’s. Later on when he was older, my dad felt too self-conscious to get in front of everybody and be baptized.
We only had worship service every other Sunday, because the preacher came out from Inavale and served the Inavale church, too. When we didn’t have a minister, we just held Sunday school.
I remember Norman Johnson reading the minutes, and it was always about forty, forty-two people to Sunday school. He was elected secretary when he was still a teenager, about eighteen.
Ray Wilson was the Sunday School superintendent for all the time. He’d always try to get someone else but no one else would do it. When it was cold, he’d come up early in the morning to build a fire in the coal furnace in the basement. A steel grate opened into the church, and everyone gathered around the heating grate to warm up. We had opening exercises and singing, then classes.
When I was nineteen, I couldn’t get home one weekend because of the rain, and that’s when they elected me teacher of the young people’s class. It was the class for anyone from thirteen up who wasn’t married, regardless of their age.
What a challenge, teaching that class. I started listening to the Spoken Word and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to get ideas.
I decided to hold a contest to increase our class attendance. I divided the class into two sides, and for a few months, whichever side had the most people in attendance would be the winners. The losers had to entertain the winners at a party and furnish the refreshments.
A few weeks after this announcement, I saw the young people’s side full, about thirty-five or forty just in my class. All the young people from the community came and some from neighboring communities as well, because they wanted to come to the party. Parties were a big thing out there. After all, we lived in the country, and there weren’t many parties where everyone could come. That contest really got people out to my Sunday School class.
Any parties were usually connected to family events. When my parents had their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in 1935, they had an open house during the day with a party in the evening for the young people. Mother really wanted me to have that party. It was announced in the New Virginia Church, the Lutheran Church, the Extension Club, as “everyone come” to the open house with a party in the evening for the young people. Word spread around, no invitations were sent out, it was just word of mouth.
Mother prepared food for the open house—sandwiches, cake, homemade ice cream, lemonade and ice tea. The leftover food from the open house we ate at the party that night along with more homemade ice cream.
We played Farmer in the Dell, Skip to my Lou, Ol’ Dan Tucker, a lot of games where you had circles where the boys went one way and the girls another, you marched around and wherever you stopped, that person would be your partner, then you and your partner went to the center. Those kinds of games were popular back then, even college students enjoyed them.
Whenever anyone got married, the community had a shivaree and made lots of noise by clanging pans together. There would be cake and other refreshments at the parent’s home, which is usually where the weddings took place. The couple would come out after they were married, and everyone played games. Sometimes there were hard feelings if things got out of han
d, with people forcing their way into the house.
When I was a child, nobody had insurance, so to help the community, they had something called the 22 Club. Twenty-two people in the neighborhood got together for a party, usually an oyster supper in someone’s home, and contributed one dollar. It would be oyster soup made with milk and butter, with oyster crackers. You could buy a gallon of oysters in town, they weren’t so expensive back then.
When someone in the 22 Club got sick, the club took money from the treasury and paid the doctor bill. It was like community insurance. When the Drought and Depression started, it was discontinued because even a dollar would be too much for some families.
I went to Epworth League conferences with my New Virginia cousins and to Lutheran League conferences with my cousin Mildred Holt. She lived in the Norwegian community where everyone was Lutheran. Mother and I went over to the Norwegian community for the Norwegian Ladies Aid as well as going to the New Virginia Ladies Aid. For refreshments, when the Ladies Aid was at our house, we’d serve sandwiches and two or three cakes.
Mother’s heart was always in the Norwegian Church, even though we went to New Virginia. She had made a painting for the Norwegian Church, a mural on the wall above the altar, a picture of Jesus as a Good Shepherd holding a little lamb and a lamb by His side. That church burned down later and the painting was lost.
At Christmas we drew names at school and gave a present to whoever we drew. Everyone gave a present to the teacher, a handkerchief or something like that. We’d have a little party for the families, and the whole community attended the school program where we’d speak pieces, learn recitations, and have a little play.
Christmas Eve we always had a program at the New Virginia Church where we dramatized the birth of Christ and spoke pieces.
One year Mother made me a gray satin dress out of an old one that she had. I was feeling in the pocket and found a thread to pull on, and I tore the dress where the pocket was. It was a six inch tear, and when I spoke my piece in the program, I had to hold my hand a certain way to cover up the big hole in my dress.
We had a big Christmas tree at the church, who knows where they got it. There would be a lot of presents under it, and I’d always get two, one from the teacher and one from whoever drew my name in Sunday school class.
We had a couple Lambrecht families in the church, the south Lambrechts, the north Lambrechts, and the grandparents. The south Lambrechts had lots of children—Opal, Theola, Margret, and others—and these Lambrecht families celebrated their family Christmas at this party. They exchanged presents and each of the Lambrecht children would get six or eight presents.
I always felt so left out because there I was with two little presents when they had so many. I never liked that. The Brooks’ and the Lovejoys and me were the only ones who didn’t get a lot of presents.
On Christmas nights Mother, Dad and I attended the program at the Norwegian Church. They had lighted candles on the tree. There weren’t as many presents because the families didn’t exchange like they did at New Virginia. It was always nice to see their program, but I didn’t have a part since it wasn’t my community.
New Virginia Methodist Church
Country school children
School boys
Chapter Eight:
The Little Country School
The little country school was a half mile east of the church. The church was on a county road and the school on a private road, off the main county road. John Wilson, my dad’s uncle, gave the land for both. For the school, he donated three to five acres, a corner plot. There was plenty of parking, the school building, the outhouses and a little extra space.
I went to first through fourth grade at the original one-room school. A big stove over to one side had a metal circular protective ring around it, about four or five feet high, so kids couldn’t get too close and burn themselves. The ring would be warm but not hot like the stove.
The blackboards were on the north wall behind the teacher’s desk, covering the entire wall.
My first teacher, Mrs. Davis, stayed at our place. She had gray hair and wore satin dresses and pointed, high heel shoes that laced above her ankles. You never saw people in our neighborhood wearing shoes like that. Those were fancy shoes.
Mrs. Davis, an experienced teacher from Oklahoma, had the idea to start some younger kids in a “Beginners Class.” She thought I should start school early at age four and be in this class. I would finish kindergarten, or beginners class, and first grade in one year.
On my first day of school, Mother and Aunt Bernice sat in the back of the room because I didn’t want to stay. Then Opal Lambrecht, who was in first grade, came and took my hand, and that made me feel better.
Us beginners sat by the stove where the eighth graders would help us. We often colored, and one day someone had a box of crayons with a beautiful pink crayon. I’d never seen a box of crayons with that shade of pink in it, and I told my mother I had to have crayons with that pink for school. So she bought them for me, and that pink crayon was always the one used up first in my crayon box.
Once when a boy acted up, the teacher made him stand facing the blackboard. She drew a circle on the board and had him stand on his tiptoes with his nose touching inside the circle. When she turned her back to teach a class, he quickly erased the circle and drew one lower so he didn’t have to stay on his tiptoes.
We sat two to a desk, and one time I had a boil on my hip where it hurt to sit. Opal Lambrecht, my seat mate, changed seats with me so I could sit with my sore hip hanging off the seat.
In third grade, my seat mate was a new boy named Fay Lovejoy and oh, he was spoiled and kind of filthy-minded. I hated to sit with him. His parents were divorced, he lived with his father, and Fay talked kind of dirty and had bad manners. “I gotta go piss.” Or “I gotta sh--.” He swore all the time, saying “goddam it.”
I didn’t like to hear that language. Sometimes the other boys would swear when they were off together, but generally not in school.
But then a lot of the boys were kind of coarse, they were farm boys, and they called things by their common names.
One day a boy told about helping a calf being born that morning, when the dad had to stick his arm into the cow to pull the calf out. Sometimes they told jokes about kind of dirty things, not always farm things. I can still remember some of those jokes, but I don’t repeat them.
Fay Lovejoy was only there for part of a year, then he and his dad moved away. I was so glad I didn’t have to sit by him anymore. Boys wore their dirty farm overalls to school and sometimes stank like cow manure. But I was used to my dad’s dirty overalls and to the smells of farm life. That didn’t bother me like Fay Lovejoy’s language did.
I always had to wear long underwear folded over under my socks and long cotton socks up to my knees. A bunch of the older girls were talking about not wearing long underwear.
I wanted to be grown up like them, so I said, “Well, I’m not wearing long underwear either.”
They didn’t believe me, so they took me out by the outhouse and rolled my socks down to see if I had long underwear on.
They all laughed at me. “So much you’re not wearing long underwear! What’s that?”
I was so embarrassed and never wanted to tell lies after that.
Norma Lambrecht was two years younger than me and oh, she had the best lunches! I’d bring my gallon lunch bucket, a Karo syrup bucket, with a homemade bread and jelly sandwich, a piece of cake, sometimes a thermos with chocolate milk. Or I’d have a boiled egg and some meat wrapped up.
Norma had bought bread and bologna sandwiches, a cookie with marshmallow topping, things her mother bought in town, like bananas. I looked at those lunches so longingly.
That Lambrecht family had a lot of bought things. Norma’s mother was younger than mine and maybe she didn’t want to bake as much. And they had a lot more chickens than we did, to trade eggs for special things from the store.
The worst lunches
belonged to Irving Brooks and his brother and sister. Their mother was very intelligent, directed plays, wrote poetry and read books. They’d have ugly bread, kind of gray and misshapen, and not much else in their lunch pails.
My mother always made nice big, white loaves of bread.
At lunch, the big girls discussed their weekends. “Hey, we went to the dance at the Bohemian hall Saturday night.”
The boys talked about horses and cows and helping their fathers. “Dad pulled the hay rack up to the feedlot, and I had to pitch it all by myself.”
Once in awhile someone would see a show or a movie and tell everyone about it. That was a big event.
One time Desco Lovejoy brought his cousin, Lawrence Lacour to school to visit. His dad was an evangelist preacher and his mother a Lambrecht. Lawrence was so handsome, with nice features and dark, curly hair, and very nice-mannered, a couple years older than me.
After that, I kept asking about him and hoped he’d visit again.
Outside the school, the fence around the pastures and the north field had thistles piled up about fifteen feet. We’d push them up a little bit and make a cave in there and play house like little girls do. We’d get boards and tree branches to prop up the thistles and have a little cave to play house.
Every now and then, a skunk went in and out through the hole in the foundation under the school. Sometimes in the mornings we smelled a faint skunk smell and knew it was under there. The boys put a trap near the hole in the foundation, and one morning when we got to school, the skunk was caught in the trap.
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