♪ ♪ I am one who believes that where we grew up and when we grew up influences who we are today in ways that go way beyond in many instances, our knowledge of that factor.

How we see the world how we see our relationship with other people how we see the land and it's importance how we view nature.

All of those, for those of us who grew up on farms at a time when I did are a part of who we are today.

For a long time I was not too pleased to share it because I was enamored by the "more cosmopolitan" people that I knew who had grown up in the city and knew the ways of the city.

Today, I'm as proud as proud can be of having experienced what I experienced.

I wouldn't change it for anything.

Not that it was all wonderful, because it wasn't.

We never made a whole lot of money.

And all during the later years of the Depression when I was a wee little one things were tough, but we had work.

Too much work, in my estimation as kid.

But we had something to eat and I always had a roof over my head and a pair of bib overalls.

New ones, once a year or so.

What more would you want?

And friends.

And a chance to have some fun to go fishing and go for a walk.

What more is there that's important?

Jerry Apps, A Farm Story was funded in part by Ron and Colleen Weyers the Edward J. Okray Foundation the Wisconsin History Fund with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.

If you go back to the middle of the Great Depression that's when I was born, in 1934 out here in Waushara County which is in the central part of the state.

We had one of those terminal moraine farms where the glacier stopped.

Oh, my gosh, it was stony.

It was sandy, and it was hilly.

As my dad said, in the spring when we, every April, picked stones day after day "If nothing else grows on this place if nothing else ever comes up we can depend on our crop of stones."

Our farm was 160 acres, quarter section which was common in those days.

There were 80 acres on each side of a country road.

A gravel, mostly dirt, country road.

Our farmhouse was a big house.

Many of the old farmhouses looked quite spacious and they were.

We had no indoor plumbing.

We had no electricity.

That old house was the coldest place you could imagine because it was not insulated.

People didn't know about insulation.

But I have fond memories of the place.

There were two doors into the house.

Everyone came in through the kitchen door.

There was a little porch around in the back.

There was also a front door, which led into the parlor.

We knew immediately, when someone came to the house if they knew or did not know about country people.

If they were a sales person out of the city they would stumble up toward the front door.

The front door wouldn't even open.

You could not get the front door open.

It was nailed shut.

Anybody who knew farmers knew that you came around to the kitchen door on the porch and you rapped on the kitchen door.

You were greeted by Fanny, our old farm dog who would bark two or three times.

It'd scare the bajeebers out of these city salespeople who didn't understand farm dogs either.

Because the farm dog I suspected was a guard dog of fashion but this big collie dog was as friendly as could be.

She was mostly announcing someone's coming.

I can remember my mother being so put out with a salesperson who wouldn't get out of the car because the dog was standing there barking.

She just let him sit there.

Kitchens on these old farm houses were enormous.

They were huge, bigger than the dining room larger than the parlor.

We never used the parlor.

The parlor was for the city relatives.

It's the kitchen where everything happened.

The big kitchen table a wooden table with an oilcloth on it and a kerosene lamp in the middle that was the center of all activity on our farm.

My dad had his place at the head of the table my mother on the opposite end of the table.

I have twin brothers.

They sat on one side, and I sat on the other.

We never varied.

We sat in those same places all the time.

It's like the cows in the barn always stood in the same stall.

We had our stalls for breakfast, dinner and supper all gathered around the kitchen table.

The kitchen table is where all of the decisions about the farm were made, as well.

What sorts of seed should we buy for the garden this year?

How are the cows doing?

My mother kept all the records.

In the winter time, that was a nice warm place.

There's the kitchen stove, the oven door was open.

My mother was always baking bread and the smell of fresh bread is something that I've never forgotten.

Now in the dining room, was our telephone.

We didn't have electricity, but we also had a telephone.

It was a party-line telephone.

It had a ringer-dinger on this side and it had a listener on that side you held up and a mouthpiece in the front.

When you spoke into it, you knew very well that beyond the person that you were talking to there were probably ten or 15 other people also listening in.

In addition to it being our connection to the outside world it was our safety net.

In those days, there were no EMTs.

The fire truck would not leave the village of Wild Rose which was our nearest town, four and a half miles away.

So farmers were on their own.

If there was a fire, the wind blew over your barn somebody was gored by a bull or whatever action that might have happened you got on the phone and you rang what was called a general ring.

A general ring was ding, ding, ding, ding, ding ding, ding, ding, like that.

When you heard that, you rushed to the phone because you knew one of your neighbors was in dire straits.

No matter what you were doing and no matter how little you may have cared about that person because farm people like are everybody else they don't all get along you rushed to that person's place.

You knew that person was in trouble and needed your help.

[old-time phone ringing] Our ring was a long and three shorts.

That's what differentiated people.

They knew when it was their ring that the phone was for them.

But everybody else went to the phone, as well.

One ring, in particular, three shorts, ding, ding, ding whenever that came in, we knew we knew, there was something important for us to hear.

If not important, at least juicy.

Because this family had a wonderful reputation.

When they first moved in, the farm had been vacant for awhile.

Then we heard it had been purchased.

We all gathered at this house and we all brought something to eat.

We all sat around the table.

We discovered that they had five boys but we also discovered that these kids could cuss.

I mean, these kids were the best cussers.

They knew cuss words we'd never heard before.

I mean, they could string together cuss words in such an eloquent fashion that we couldn't help but just marvel.

My mother was sitting off to the side being the good Christian woman that she was.

I could see she was not taking all this in too well.

She whispered to my dad, "We've got to go home.

This is not a good place to be."

By the way, when we were traveling home my mother said, "I don't want you boys" meaning my brothers and me "I don't want you associating with those boys again."

My dad said, "Listen, Eleanor they are going to associate with those boys.

We're going to associate with them because they are our neighbors."

That's very important to remember.

As different as they were, as unusual as they were and maybe as sort of raw and rough ashey were they were still our neighbors.

I had such a wonderful experience in sociology as a kid, without ever realizing it.

Because in our community, we had Welsh families... We had German families.

We had bohemian families from Czechoslovakia.

Polish families.

And we had English people.

All of us assembled together.

We seldom talked about religion because we had Methodists, we had Lutherans we had Presbyterians, we had Catholics.

And we had a bunch of them not belonging to anything, all working together living together, farming together.

And to tell you the truth having a wonderful time together, as you think about it.

It was just a fascinating time on the farm in those days.

I'm the oldest so I'm expected to be out in the barn at 5:30 in the morning helping with the milking.

We had two barn lanterns.

My dad had one and I had one.

I'd hang my barn lantern on a nail in back of the cows on the north end of the barn.

In the south end of the barn my dad hangs his lantern on a nail.

The cows are all lined up.

There's about 14 or 16 of them all standing in stanchions.

I have my cows to milk and he has his cows to milk.

The barn on a winter day is the warmest place on the farm.

Underneath a big, old Holstein cow is by far the most comfortable place you could find as strange as that sounds.

So I would crawl under this cow put the milk pail between my knees sit on a three-legged stool The cat comes by and you squirt a little milk in the direction of the cat.

[laughs] I'm tucked under this big, old Holstein and she's looking around at me and she's saying, "Good morning, Jerry."

I'm kind of half asleep, and I'm just getting warm.

I have the easy milking cows.

My dad has the tougher ones to do.

When they come into the barn they each knew to come into their own stall.

There was Violet, Maisy, Dolores and Florence.

Everyone had it's own name.

We got to know every one of them.

Our farm dog knew their personalities better than I did.

She dealt with each cow in a very particular way and in a mysterious kind of way.

There was a communication between animal species that we don't understand.

That was going on with Fanny talking to these cattle.

They had great respect for her.

[dog barking] Farm life was a quiet time during those years before electricity, and tractors and all the rest of the noisy stuff that came along.

That's when I got to know my dad.

He might be on a cow right next to me.

He would sometimes ask how things were going but not usually.

I would usually have to ask some question for him to answer.

Now my dad was a wonderful story teller.

Oh, my gosh.

He got as far as fifth grade in school.

In his generation, by the time you got big enough to work it didn't matter how old you were big enough to work, you worked.

I learned something very important from the fact that he had only a fifth-grade education.

Formal education does not necessarily equate with being smart.

He knew how to fix most everything.

He knew how to take care of animals.

He had a wonderful way of figuring.

He could figure in his head faster than most people could figure it with a calculator today.

He was very well liked by the neighbors.

He would help anybody with anything.

You look at his face and you could tell by the satisfaction in his face if you did something well.

But there was none of this "good job" stuff, and all that.

That was not-- we didn't do that.

In early March, when I would get up in the mornings and go out the barn now the days were somewhat longer already I would look for the dripping of eaves the first melt.

You get out to the barn and Pa might say something like, "I can smell spring today."

And he was right, I could too.

He's getting anxious, because by the middle of March he wants to get out in the fields.

There's work to be done.

There's plowing to do, with a team of horses and a one-bottom, 16" walking plow.

How do you remember all that?

Because I did it.

I talk to kids sometimes.

I talk about walking plows, they think the plow was walking.

The plow was not walking.

I was the one who was doing the walking and the team was walking, Frank and Charlie were their names.

Plowing with a team of horses requires about four or five eyes.

You've got to keep your eye on the team and the plow.

You've got to keep your eye on where you're headed because you want to go in a straight line.

One of the things that you were prized for was whether you could plow in a straight line.

You had a marker, maybe your handkerchief was hanging on a tree a quarter mile away and you see that and you're plowing towards that.

You got another eye looking for stones.

You'd hold on to the plow handles.

Whenever the plow would hit a stone it would leap out of the ground.

You'd put it back in and go.

I mean, you're just beside yourself.

[sounds of farmer plowing with horse team] I'll talk about my mother for a little bit.

She got as far as seventh grade in school because, again, her folks said "Well, it's time for you to find a job."

So she became a maid when she was, I don't know, 13-years old.

My mother had two major projects the garden and the chickens.

She ruled both with a heavy hand.

We were under her employ when those two things were involved.

We had probably 100-150 laying hens white leghorns they were.

Every year we'd replace some.

The old chickens became stew in the fall.

We canned the chicken meat and all that kind of stuff.

But the new chicks we would order from a hatchery someplace in southern Wisconsin.

They would arrive at the train depot.

George was the depot agent.

He would call on the party line telephone.

"Herman, your chicks are here."

I remember going down with my dad to the depot and here are stacks of chicks.

The boxes were about like that and they were divided into little squares.

I suppose there were 6-8 little chicks in each corner.

They were peeping their hearts out.

I mean, it's just a wonderful sound all these little chicks just a-peeping away.

We'd stack these little chicks in the back of the car bring them home, take them in the house and put them in back of the wood stove to warm them up.

Because this was usually in April and it was kind of chilly.

It was kind of fun.

The little chicks were just grand to watch them grow up.

When the chicks had grown up then they found their way into the hen house and the ones that my mother had declared, obsolete is the wrong word but they're not producing well anymore.

We'd pull them off the shelf and we would have a chicken butchering day.

I tell you, one time the city cousins were out when we were butchering chickens.

They could not handle the fact that there would be as many as two or three chickens running around without their heads on.

We, of course, took all this for granted.

We never bought a chicken in a grocery store that I remember.

Never did that.

It sounds terrible, gruesome, and all the rest but it was a very natural progression from the chick to the hen house to the cellar shelf, and to our table.

Potatoes... when I was a young guy was the major cash crop all through this area.

We planted 20 acres of potatoes.

We would spend the evenings after we got home from school and after the chores were done down in the cellar cutting seed potatoes.

Which means, every seed potatoes has a number of eyes we'd cut so there was at least one eye on each one.

Then we'd have enough for the next day's planting.

We did that many nights.

We'd work the field up, plowed it, disked it, dragged it, smoothed it down.

Then we marked it with a horse-drawn marker that made little grooves in the ground.

The rows were 40" apart because that's the width of the back end of a draft horse, 40".

So it could walk down the rows and cultivate.

We would mark it both ways.

It's called checking, both ways.

Then we would plant, with a hand planter wherever the marks crossed.

A potato planter is a metal device with a handle on it you'd drop the seed potato in the top and you'd hear a "clip," "clip."

It would open and close as you dropped the potato in and it went into the ground.

You worked it all the way across the 20-acre field.

I don't a quarter-mile long, something like that.

My dad and a neighbor, or a hired man sometimes would do that, I didn't do a lot of that.

That was hard work.

Work had an elevated level of importance.

"Work" was when you went out and shocked grain or when you went to the neighbor's on a threshing crew.

That was work.

"Chores" were something you did twice a day and in the middle of the day, too, if you were home.

You did chores all the time.

Especially on a small dairy farm.

Chores are hauling in wood, feeding the chicken throwing down silage, carrying in straw, milking cows.

You never bragged about it, you never talked about it but you talked about "work" often.

You talked about how many acres of grain you shocked.

You might talk about that.

You never talked about how many cows you milked and how much silage you threw down.

Everybody did that.

There was nothing special about chores.

Everything special about work.

We're going to put this right here.

What is it?

[indistinct answer] I've got one that's not such a-- That's an early one, 67 days... We had a big garden... A big garden, a quarter of an acre garden.

A big enough garden so you could cultivate with a horse in a one-horse cultivator, 40-inch rows.

I still have such a garden.

I've never gotten over that.

What did we have in the garden?

We did not have potatoes, because we had 20 acres of them!

We had plenty of potatoes.

But there were beans, and peas, and carrots radishes, and lettuce, and lots of cabbage, because of the sauerkraut sweet corn, pumpkins.

Then all that stuff was canned and stored in the cellar.

My mother canned everything.

She canned meat.

She canned beef and she canned pork.

She canned beans, and peas, and carrots.

She canned raspberries and strawberries.

She made grape jelly and strawberry jelly and raspberry jelly.

All of these were sitting on the shelves.

Further down into the cellar was a bin of potatoes, a couple bins of potatoes a half a bin of rutabagas, a bunch of onions, carrots, pumpkins, squash, all of that.

The garden was very important.

I don't recall that my folks ever bought a vegetable from a store, ever.

Yeah, they'll freeze off tonight.

It's not going to freeze tonight, is it?

Yeah, I think so.

Let's see if you've got any radishes here.

I don't think so, no.

Wait...!

[both laugh] You can have that one!

Here, we'll share it!

[both laugh] Starting in April it was non-stop something going on all the time.

If something wasn't going on, a planting, or so on or it would be a raining day, then we would hoe.

Oh, my god, we would hoe.

We would hoe the potatoes; we would hoe the garden.

We would hoe the corn.

We would hoe the thistles in the hollows.

We would hoe the quack grass.

We hoed a lot.

We got to, well, we learned how to hoe.

I can go at great lengths telling you about different kinds of hoes and different ways of sharpening them.

Different ways of making it through a day of hoeing which is the most mind numbing project in the world.

But it gave you a chance to think about things and to develop your imagination to appreciate the world around you.

To listen to the birds, and lots of stuff.

You play all these games with yourself when you're alone and hoeing, and you've got to keep doing it because the old man is on the next row.

And if you're screwing up, he's going to let you know it.

So you keep on hoeing.

We didn't have any watches so you learn how to watch the sun.

Pretty soon, "Oh, gosh, it's got to be a least another hour."

The old man had a watch but he wouldn't look at it very often.

So we were always waiting "Oh, when is it going to be time to eat?"

Especially for noon, oh, good.

By lunch time we were just starved.

When it got to be lunch time, we'd all would hurry on home.

My mother would have a huge noon meal I mean an enormous meal at noon.

We would eat this big meal and we'd all go outside under a shade tree, flat out sound asleep for 15-20 minutes, half an hour.

The old man would say, "Okay, time to get back out."

Then we're back at it, whatever we're doing.

Geez, we worked hard, long, long days.

We started at the crack of dawn, before dawn sometimes.

Of course we were tired.

We were exhausted.

In fact, one of my dad's mantas was when you're talking about juvenile delinquency he'd kind of rolled his eyes when somebody'd mention that.

He said, "Just remember, a tired kid is a good kid."

[laughs] There's some truth to that.

Making hay a huge project on the farm when I was a kid.

Because dairy cows in order produce anything in the winter time you needed to have a good supply of hay.

We would grow, on our 160-acre farm probably 30 acres of hay.

My dad would hitch the team, Frank and Charlie, to our mower and head out to the hay field and cut the hay.

Then my brothers and I were faced with that onerous task of coming out here and piling the hay into bunches or as they were sometimes called, hay cocks.

Each of us had our own three-tined fork.

You started by piling little pieces of hay one layer on top of the other until it was probably four feet high or so.

You made it so it had a little cover on it a little top on it, so it would shed rain.

Oufather was a stickler.

These hay bunches had to be made just right.

And they had to be in straight rows.

We were German.

It was a thing to see, though.

At the end of the day, there were hay bunches from one end to the other.

We would often stand, leaning on our forks looking out over that field of hay.

My dad was not one to talk about things artistic but he had a sense of it.

We looked out over that hay and he would say something like, "Isn't that something?"

And it was.

It was something to see.

Then when it was time to haul the hay to the barn which would be a couple, three days later once more, we would hitch the team to the hay wagon and go out to the field.

We would pitch these hay cocks onto the hay wagon until there was an immense load of hay.

Then we would pull that load of hay up to the barn.

In the haymow, on a warm day in summer maybe it was 85 outside, it'd be 110.

In those days, my mother and dad made homemade Hires root beer.

My folks had a bottling machine and empty bottles.

To tell you the truth I think this was left over from Prohibition but we didn't talk about that.

[laughs] These bottles of root beer, now we stored them down in the cellar.

The big treat when we would bring up one of these huge loads of hay my mother would come out to the wagon with a bottle of homemade Hires root beer.

It was wonderful.

The Fourth of July, when I was a kid was a wonderful celebration because we would have a half-day off.

Pa said, we can't afford to get away from haying for a whole day.

But we'll work in the morning and we'll go to Silver Lake in the afternoon.

Our mother would make a magnificent picnic lunch and we would drive to Silver Lake.

There, under the pine trees we would eat this big picnic lunch.

My brothers and I would jump into Silver Lake for a swim.

We did that every year.

Lots of people there, Silver Lake was a tourist attraction.

We always looked askance at all these tourists.

You could spot them, no problem at all.

A lot of them wore short pants.

A farmer never wore short pants.

That's dumb, you'd scratch your legs all to the dickens.

The fireworks were always at the lake in the evening.

But we wouldn't go because we had the chores to do, milking to do and all the rest of it.

Sometimes we would sit out on our back porch.

If it was a clear night we could see the five miles or so to Silver Lake and dimly, on the horizon, we could catch the fireworks.

Then the next day it was back to work as it had been.

You got any more gear to move on the truck, Ralph?

Yep... Threshing started after haying season.

Everybody in our community had from 20 to 30 acres of oats.

The threshing season began when Pa hitched the team to the grain binder.

It was a far more complicated machine than a mower because it had chains running this way and that.

Bundles would come spewing out of the side of the machine.

We, again my brothers and I, were faced with the task of standing up these bundles into shocks.

If a grain shock fell down, then you were in trouble.

They needed to withstand the wind.

They needed to withstand the rain.

The grain shocks would stand there for maybe a week and on threshing day, oh, what a deal that was!

Now, a threshing machine was the most complicated piece of equipment that ever came onto a farm.

Belts and pulleys running in every direction.

It was a wonderful machine and once it began operating it shook and the dust was flying.

We'd invite all the neighbors to come.

Some would come with teams and their wagons.

Some would come as pitchers, and some would come as carriers.

At noontime, the whole crew would pile into the house and my mother would have prepared a wonderful meal that was akin to Thanksgiving or Christmas.

What was also interesting is that the farm women all helped each other but they competed with each other, too.

You just knew it was going on because everyone wanted to be known as having the very best threshing meal.

Some of them weren't that good.

When we would come to a farm were we knew the meal was not going to be a great meal we would hurry everything up so we would get finished and get on to the next place.

If we knew that that farmer's wife had a really fine spread we would slow everything down so that we might get an extra meal out of that place.

Everybody knew that we were doing that.

[laughs] One of the moments that I remember most vividly I was 14 years old, or so is pitching bundles from the wagon into the machine.

It's a skill.

You have to keep them in order.

You can't put them in crossways.

They've got to be the same distance apart.

You're always looking to where to catch the next bundle with your three-tined fork.

All the while, my dad is watching.

That was the most important days in my life, really because the day that you were able to pitch off a load of bundles into the threshing machine was the day you moved from being a boy to a man.

My dad had this little smile on his face.

I knew when I finished, and my arms ached and my back hurt and it's terribly hard work, that I had done it.

I've never forgotten that.

Going to town was a big deal because we didn't do it very often.

Enormous place... [laughter] all 528 people that lived there at the time.

Main Street was just wonderful because we had, besides the mercantile store there was a dry good store, there was a harness shop there was a restaurant, there was a hotel.

Hotz's Hardware store.

My dad and I, we would go down to Hotz's Hardware and there in the back of Hotz's Hardware were a whole bunch of old-timers gathered to share stories with each other lie to each other, I suppose you might say.

I was always along.

The stories were just wonderful.

I heard them over and over again as these old-timers would talk about how things were going how the cows were milking, how the pastures were doing.

How it was last year, when things were better and how 40 years ago, they were so much better still.

There are people who are natural storytellers and many of these farmers were.

Some of them were tremendous embellishers.

They would tell the same story over and over again and every time it's different.

We had one neighbor, he was so special he just out and out lied.

He created stories out of whole cloth.

I'd just sit there listening.

This guy was telling stories that just made no sense at all.

But I thought, this is a wonderful story it was so ch not true, I'm sure.

There's nothing better... Pickles were a very important part of our life in those days.

To earn a little money that we could use at the mercantile in Wild Rose.

Every farmer, in the days when I was a kid in central Wisconsin had a pickle patch, as we referred to it.

Cucumbers, a half an acre sometimes an acre, the size of the cucumber patch depended on the size of the family.

The kids did all of the picking.

We would pick them into pails.

Oh, what a back-breaking job it was.

But cucumber money was our money.

It was a way for farm kids, who didn't have any money there wasn't such a thing as an allowance.

We didn't know what that meant.

It was money used to buy a bicycle to buy Christmas presents, maybe a .22 rifle.

At the end of the day we would pile the sacks of cucumbers into the back of the Plymouth and drive to Wild Rose to the H.J.

Heinz salting station.

They were dumped into a sorter that separated the number ones, the little short gherkins from the number fives, the big old dills.

Then we received our check.

In those days, number one cucumbers sold for $25 a hundred.

But you never got a 100 pounds in a 100 years.

They were just little tiny things the size of your little finger.

They number fives, that were fun to pick because you could grab hold of them and they weren't hiding under some leaf.

Well, 50 cents a 100 if you were lucky, sometimes a quarter.

That is an enormous, old Black Willow.

My, goodness.

I was looking to see if I could find the nail holes.

I couldn't find 'em.

Tuesday evenings, that was the night for free movies.

We would all hurry at the farm to get the chores done and drive down to Wild Rose.

On the banks the mill pond there was a incline and there had been set out planks for seating.

The operator of the free movie would arrive and he would set up this machine.

The screen was a bed sheet that he somehow fastened to a 2 x 4 that was nailed against a big, old Black Willow that hung over the mill pond.

The main feature would sometimes be Gene Autry sometimes it would be Roy Rogers.

I mean, it was absolutely wonderful.

As we sat there and you could hear the bull frogs down in the mill pond you could hear, later in the summer, the crickets.

I remember, this was in 1945, World War II.

Many, many young men from Wild Rose had gone off to the war.

VE Day, victory in Europe, had occurred somewhat earlier and now we were waiting for VJ day when Japan would finally give up.

We were sitting at the free show waiting for the movie to come on and then we hear gunshots for heaven's sakes.

We all look around.

We look, and coming down Main Street in kind of a jagged line were the World War I veterans who were in the American Legion.

They were shooting their M1 rifles into the air and they were yelling "The war is over!

The war is over!"

Pretty soon the entire crowd was joining in throwing their hats into the air and yelling, "The war is over!"

People were jumping up and down.

And the taverns, everybody poured out of the taverns.

Pretty soon, we were all on Main Street.

We were ignoring the movie.

Nobody paid any attention to Gene Autry.

Even my dad, who was not much for celebrating I saw him celebrating.

My mother was celebrating.

My mother was especially interested in the war being over because everything had been rationed especially sugar.

Then, all of the sudden, my dad put his hand on my shoulder and he said, "That's enough celebration.

It's time to go home."

And we drove home.

In Wild Rose at that time there was a huge sign on the front of the Village Hall listing every young man who was off to war.

There were several with gold stars in front of their names which meant they weren't coming back.

That evening when we were celebrating there were people not only cheering but there were a lot of people crying.

It was a tough time.

The country schools in those days that was the social center of the community obviously, the educational center.

Beyond that, it defined the community.

It ge a community a sense of identity.

When people asked you, "Where do you live?"

You would not say four and a half miles west of Wild Rose You would say "I live in the Chain of Lakes School community."

People knew where that was.

Country schools in those days were, at least up in this neck of the woods were pretty much the same.

It was one room with all eight grades in the room, one teacher.

In the front was a blackboard.

The desks were lined up, the little kids in the front larger desks in the back.

In the front of the room was the teacher's desk where she sat.

There was a bell she had on the desk.

There wasn't any reason why you shouldn't learn what was being taught because it came at you several different times.

By second grade, or so, you were already helping.

I liked reading so I was helping the younger kids with reading.

We also, of course, could listen to all of the grades ahead of us.

By the time we got to that grade, we already knew a whole lot about what they were going to be studying.

One of the really interesting things about it is how we all worked together.

The idea of community was very much there.

There wasn't any of the little kids against the big kids or the older against the younger.

There wasn't any of that.

I had potato vacation as did everyone in our country school for two weeks in October, so that could we pick potatoes.

Potato vacation was a miserable time.

It was cold in the morning and we were out there.

The way you dug potatoes was two men usually with six-tine forks shoulder-to-shoulder, would go down the rows and dig the potatoes.

One kid would come along behind picking the potatoes for those two diggers.

On a good day, you could pick 100 bushels.

I was paid to do this, a penny a bushel.

If you really worked, you could make a buck.

At the country school, we also had a Halloween party.

What we were doing then I'm sure would be totally illegal today.

The teacher would bring a big washtub and fill it with water, and you bobbed for apples.

Now to do that, you had to push your head clear to the bottom of this thing.

So your entire head was submerged.

We'd come up spitting and hoped to have bitten into an apple.

That was the Halloween program at school.

That was sort of tame.

But in the community-- Now I was never a part of any of this you've got to recognize that.

The kids would do some shenanigans that were, well, not so much appreciated.

The favorite one was, of course, tipping over outhouses.

Everybody expected to have their outhouse tipped over.

Occasionally, the person was in it.

That was not such a good thing.

But one of the favorite tricks, as I remember was that one of our neighbors I think it was Alan Davis, came out in the morning and noticed that his cows were all harnessed that the kids had harnessed up his cows with the horse harnesses.

Our nearest neighbor was a half a mile away and that was considered a close neighbor.

The other direction, there was another one maybe three-quarters of a mile away.

Our good friends, with the boys they were a mile away a little more than that by the road but we could go across the fields.

By the way, we thought nothing of walking from farm to farm.

We would walk to Chain of Lakes to ice skate in the winter, which was a mile and a half.

When we would get there, we'd build a big bon fire.

Oh, the nights in the fall and the winter were so dark.

The blessing of that is when we'd be walking to a neighbor on a clear night in January when it was maybe zero, and the snow crunched under foot the whole sky was ablaze with stars.

You could see stars everywhere and in every direction.

It was a magnificent time.

We would ice skate at night, we would ski at night.

I don't remember ever having any problems seeing.

There wasn't such a thing as a flashlight.

We never used lamps or lanterns when we walked anywhere.

Yet we seemed to be able to see where we were going.

But back to the school year.

One of the major social events of the year was the Christmas program at the country school.

Everybody, every kid, from maybe five years old in first grade to the kid that might be 14 years old in eighth grade was expected to participate.

Stand up on the stage and say their piece as it was called in those days in addition to being a part of the musical numbers and little plays, and all that sort of stuff.

I was really fretting about this because I was a shy little guy.

I said, "Miss, I'd just as soon not be a part of the Christmas program.

It's something I don't want to do."

She whispered to me, "I have for you a secret.

I don't want you to tell anybody.

But here, if you do what I'm going to tell you you will have no trouble saying your piece standing up on the stage and looking out over the crowd..." When she mentioned looking out over the crowd I tell you, right away, the cold sweat the idea of looking out, here are all the neighbors the aunts, and the uncles, and the cousins and the bachelors, everybody.

Everybody came.

It didn't matter if they had kids in school or not.

The idea of standing up there just scared the bajeebers out of me.

Well, now it's the night of the Christmas program and I've got tucked away in my mind this little secret that she told me.

Here I am standing on the stage, fresh, new bib overalls and I say the thing without any problem.

What was the secret?

She said, "Do you see the damper on that stovepipe in the back of the room?"

I said, "I see that damper."

She said, "When you stand up there and give your talk you look at that damper, don't look at the crowd.

They'll think you're looking right at them but you're not, and you will do well."

I had been looking at the damper on the stovepipe ever since.

By the time we finished eighth grade every kid in that little, remote country school knew how to stand up on the stage and say his or her piece.

That's an invaluable lesson.

Many people don't realize why country school kids were able to do that.

They had practiced from the time they were in first grade.

The people in the village, in Wild Rose they all had electricity.

That went way back to the days when the mill generated electricity for the village but none of our neighbors had electricity until after the war.

Everybody had lamps and lanterns lamps in the house, lanterns outside.

Now go back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Part of his New Deal was to sign legislation that created the Rural Electrification Administration the REA.

Then they began stringing lines to farmers.

Well, World War II came along in 1941 and all that stopped because there weren't any men available.

Copper wire wasn't available.

After the war REA was now coming into the communities.

The farmers were responsible for wiring their buildings prior to electric company in the language of the day, "hooking us up" to that main line.

We hired a couple of electricians.

They wired the house and they wired the barn.

They wired the milk house and they wired the chicken house.

They wired all of the buildings.

It took them several weeks.

They wired everything except the outhouse.

My dad said, "Whatever goes on in there does not require extra light."

So the wiring was all complete but not in time for the poles to be set before the freeze-up.

All the winter of '46-'47, we waited.

Of course, we were turning switches off and on and all of that, because everything was there but there wasn't any power.

One day I came home from school and my dad said "We are hooked up."

Indeed, power surged through all these lines that were all over our farmstead.

Now we're all gathered in the kitchen and Pa's at the light switch.

We're standing there and he flips on the switch.

For the longest time, nobody said anything because we couldn't see.

It was brighter than anything we had ever experienced before.

That night, we left the barn lanterns in the house.

We went out to the barn my dad and I, to do the milking.

We, as people had forgotten that not only did we have to adjust to something that was so new, and so unknown to us but all the animals had to adjust, too.

It took a week or so before the cows became accustomed to all of that light and would be normal as we milked them.

If there was anything that happened in my life and I've traveled all over the world doing all kinds of things that single event the day that we went from lamps and lanterns to electricity is the most seared in my mind in it's importance.

My life changed dramatically that day.

Everything changed on the farm.

We wanted electric motors.

We wanted a motor to drive our pump.

We wanted a milking machine.

We wanted an elevator to move hay up into the barn, and so on.

The end of World War II, was a momentous time.

Electricity came to the farm tractors became more available.

During the war you couldn't buy a tractor.

That was the beginning of the end of the farm community that we knew in the '30s, '40s and early '50s.

The family farm was beginning to disappear.

Farmers began to buy each other out.

Larger farms were becoming the norm and guys like me were displaced.

A handful of us were fortunate enough to go to college.

The rest of them who wanted to be farmers I think one or two maybe had that opportunity.

The rest had to find work elsewhere.

It was the end of the threshing crews as combines became available.

It was the end of the country school.

They began closing, consolidating.

School buses began running up and down the road.

Everything was changing, and changing dramatically.

Changing faster than most people were aware.

They didn't realize that not only technology was changing but the social life was changing.

The definition of community was changing.

The relationship that people had with each other was changing.

The dependence that people had on each other to make their lives worth living socially, as well as economically.

They helped each other with their farm projects.

They also helped each other cially.

All of that was disappearing, and did.

One of the reasons that I do the writing that I'm doing is to remind people of what some of the values were from the days of the small family farm and consider which of those values are worth saving though they may be applied in a different way.

Values like hard work.

Values like showing up on time.

Values like never doing a job that was good enough but always trying to do it better than you'd done it previously.

That to me is a powerful value.

When people ask you to do something you do it the very best you can.

When people ask you to come to their farm at 8:00 to do something, you show up at quarter to.

When people say we're going to work until 6:00 don't hesitate to work until 6:30 if the job's not done.

Those sound, maybe silly today but those were important values at the time.

This business of always on time my dad drummed that into us.

There is no excuse for ever being late for anything.

In our house, our clocks were all set ahead by 15 minutes so that we made sure that we were on time.

And by the way, the day that we sold the cows when my dad quit farming he set all the clocks back to the regular time.

I couldn't get over it.

A very poignant moment we did not nowowave to be 15 minutes early anymore.

And the light came on and there were five of us blinking with the bright light from these long fluorescent bulbs.

My mother looks around the room and she says, "Oh, my gosh!"

My dad said, "What's wrong now?"

because she wasn't too keen on all of this.

She thought the cost of electricity was going to put us in, in those days the language of the "poor house."

My mother said, "It's the dust!

There's dust on top of the ice box.

There's dust on the stove.

There's dust on the cupboards.

There's dust everywhere!"

And this was the kicker "What did the Wisconsin Rapids relatives think when they came here and saw all that dust?"

And my dad said, "Eleanor, if we couldn't see the dust they couldn't see the dust either."

She commenced cleaning, and she cleaned for about a week to get rid of the dust in the kitchen.

Jerry Apps, A Farm Story was funded in part by Ron and Connie Weyer the Edward J. Okray Foundation the Wisconsin History Fund with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.