When I was in second grade in 1944, we moved from Omaha to a farm about two miles east of Beaver City, Nebraska. My Dad’s brother Bill owned the farm. My Dad had driven his car to Beaver City and came back with a stub-nosed International Harvester Stock truck to move us. I remember that I had to sit in the cab with my Mom and Dad while my brother Jerry and sister Dorothy got to ride in the back with the furniture. I remember that it rained and Dad pulled into the grain elevator of some little town to try to keep the stuff in back dry. He eventually had to buy a piece of canvas to cover it up before we could go on as it kept raining.
The farmhouse was two stories high and made of brick. There was no electricity, no inside water, and of course, no inside toilet facilities. A wood and coal burning kitchen stove and a more or less pot-bellied stove in the living room heated the house. For some reason they called the big kitchen stoves "ranges" and they had cooking surfaces, ovens, and hot water reservoirs for heating water for washing dishes, baths, etc.
Aladdin lamps that burned kerosene or "white gas" provided lighting. These lamps were set on the dining room table and this is where you did your reading, studying, game playing, etc. after dark.
My bedroom was upstairs and it was dark and cold and at times pretty scary for a second grader. In the yard of the house were several huge Cottonwood trees whose limbs rubbed against each other and squeaked and moaned in the wind. At times you could hear the coyotes that lived about a mile away. When it was really cold my Mom would place warm bricks in the bottom of my bed.
One of my chores when we lived there was to bring in corncobs for the cook stove. They were in big piles in the yard. To get dry ones for the stove and they had better be dry or I'd catch heck, I had to dig down into the pile and get the cobs and put them into a box or bushel basket and then carry or drag it into the house. And I had to keep the cob pile orderly and not spread out into the yard, or I caught heck.
Another of my chores was to go get the milk cows from the pasture each afternoon. This was always an adventure for a little kid, as I had to go up a lane between the fields for a half-mile or so. Some of the area was through a dry creek area with trees and steep dirt banks. I'm sure I "shot" a lot of Indians and "bad-guy" cowboys on those trips.
For doing these chores I got the sum total allowance each week of ten cents. I was allowed to spend this on Saturday night when we went to town to do the grocery shopping. Now that doesn't seem like much of an allowance, but my Dad was getting $ 40.00 a week and the house as wages. Would you care to raise a family on a little over $ 2,000.00 per year?
Sunday night was movie night. The movie changed once a week in Beaver City and so each Sunday night we would go to the movie. In fact this got to be such a regular thing, the guy that ran the projector would look to see if we were there before he started the movie.
I think we had a battery-powered radio, but it was pretty much saved for listening to the news and weather forecasts. The batteries were big dry cells and I don't think they could be recharged. The battery radios were quite large, as the electronics were all vacuum tubes. No transistors or printed circuit boards in those days...
My sister and I rode the school bus into the Beaver City School, which was about 2 miles away. We were the last ones to get on it in the morning, so we had a very short ride to school. However, in the afternoon we had to ride the whole school bus route, as we were the last ones off. It took about an hour to get home. All of the roads outside of town were gravel.
One time when I went to get the milk cows, one of the neighbor's bulls was in with them. I was really scared. I went to get a farmer I could see on a tractor in one of the next fields, but he didn't want to help me. By the time I got back to the pasture, the cows had started to move down the lane toward the barnyard, so I just let them do it themselves. That was not unusual for them to start to come in themselves, but you had to move them along or it would take them a long time.
In one of the fields beside the lane, there was a small pond created by a small earthen dam. I had strict orders from my Mother not to ever go near the pond. Well, one day on my way to get the cows I decided that I just had to go look at that pond from a lot closer. As I was crawling through the barbed wire fence of the lane, I slipped and really scratched my stomach deeply on the barbs. When I got home, bloody and everything, I lied. I told my mother that I had tripped and fallen on a piece of barbed wire. She administered first aid but I didn't go get a shot or anything. Later on the scratch became infected and the scab had to be pulled off. The result was a scar that I still have. I never did get to see the pond close up.
During the summer the whole country went on "War Time" or what we know now as day light savings time. The whole country that is except my father! We spent the whole summer an hour behind everyone else.
There was a windmill in the back yard. If you wanted the windmill to pump a continuous stream of water you hooked it up to the water pump with a big pin through a couple of shafts. Most of the time it was disconnected and if you wanted water to take into the house, you had to hand pump it.
There was an "outhouse" for toilet facilities behind the house. It actually had catalogs that were used for toilet paper.
I got to "help" my Dad a lot. Riding the tractor with him, going with him when he fed the cattle, and just "hanging around".
My second Grade teacher's name was Miss Metzger. She liked to use flashcards a lot to teach a lot of subjects. A little red headed fat girl by the name of Willa Lee Alles always beat me with the answers. I knew the answers but she had a faster mouth.