Flashback Friday - Rader Range

Today is a special Flashback for me.  This picture is the farm I worked on from high school through college, grad school and weekends when I started at the Mary Davis Home.  I suppose my job didn't really end until 1989 when my Uncle died.  We are talking roughly 15 summers,  then scattered weekends when I would drive over if he needed me or I just needed to do farm-type work to clear my head.  Uncle Ed was born on this farm, raised in this house and died in it.  It was a small farm as farms went back then, only around 320 acres.  Half of that was leased out to Dekalb seed corn in Monmouth so our work in that section was minimal.  We could see all the kids bussed in to detassle the corn from the house, that sat on a knoll overlooking the lower acreage. Always kind of felt sorry for them having to come out in the blistering hot days and run up and down the rows cutting the tassles.

The picture itself was a recent acquisition thanks to my cousin, Eddie who lives in Madison.  

1. The far corn crib was finished being built on Armistice Day, 1918. 
2. Pine trees lined the drive heading up to the house from the main gravel road.    Those trees are still there and you can see them from route 94 and from miles around.  There are pine trees on Ed's gravestone.
3. This is a shed Ed and I built with some help from various folks who did things we couldn't.  But the siding and roof was something Ed and I did basically by ourselves.  He would keep his tractors and combine in here.   If you look close enough you can see my car parked next to the shed on the left side.     
4. This out building was used one summer for sheep.  In the grossest thing that I recall there was a sheep virus epidemic that wiped them all out.  Ed had to use his tractor scoop to extract the carcases for burial down the ravine to the right. 
5. This was the headquarters of the farm.  This shed housed most of the tools, a workbench and this was also where he parked his car and truck.  The third item he kept in this area was the Massey Ferguson mini-tractor that served as the mower.  To the right of this shed was a horse trough and spigot.  This was where we got water during breaks.

The grand barn which mysteriously burned down a few months after Ed died.  This was where we would take a couple of plastic 5 gallon buckets and sit in the North doorway (always a great cool breeze) and take breaks.  This was where we would chat about anything and everything.  We painted this sucker twice, too.  He would hoist me up into the bucket of his tractor and I'd slap the paint on.   He eventually hired pros to do it, and I wasn't sorry to lose that job.  Best guess is that the fellow who took over the farming after Ed died was smoking and a bird picked up the lit butt and took into the mow.   The barn was never rebuilt, but instead a Butler building sits here now.  Just not the same.  

Those two little white out-building to the right of the house are gone now, too.  One was a storage building and the other was a pump house for the wind vane that was there in my time.  That area has been replaced by a large deck and swimming pool.  Painting that white fence around the house was one of my perennial summer jobs.  

So this is where I spent my summers.  Ed had a corn sheller and hay baler and he would help other farmers so I did my fair share of baling hay (I always stayed on the wagon so Ed could send me into Aledo for parts if it broke down).  And I did my fair share of helping shell corn.  Both are obsolete jobs now.  Farmers use the big bales today and cribbing and corn shelling just isn't done anymore.  I don't know this for a fact, but I am guessing that the whole routine of shoving augurs into a crib and then running the ears through a sheller is a distant memory.  The circle of farmers that Ed worked with are all gone now except one.  Jim Orth died several years ago, and Bub Greer went about 5 or 6 years ago I suppose.  Howard Shike is long gone but Wendell Dillavou is still around.  I ran into him on one of my trips back up North and we had a couple laughs about the old days.  We never really had any breaks in the summer.  If we weren't busy taking care of our own fields, fences and what-not, we were traveling to various other farms baling and shelling. 

The place where the big old neat barn was.  Now a Butler shed sits in its place.

Long days, sometimes chillingly monotonous.  You haven't been bored until you drive 6 miles an hour over endless rows cultivating corn.  Deviate mere inches and you wipe out four rows of new corn.  I asked for a radio once for the tractor but Uncle Ed said he didn't think I could listen and drive at the same time.

Riding the rack hay-baling was hot dirty work that required the dexterity of a sailer on the deck of a rocking ship, and the keen awareness of knowing a snake could be dangling from any bale you stabbed.  Shelling corn had its own problems, too.  Rats.  They would swarm as the pile of corn got smaller.  If one run up your pants leg (and it did a couple times) you had to grab it, crush it and then extract it without it gnawing at you flesh or other tasty bits.

The bridge Ed and I were working on and I accidentally knocked him over into the creek on the right side.

When not working we chummed around.  We'd go into the restaurant in Seaton at noon to eat if Gladys wasn't home and invariably some other farmer would say he had someone following him, and like a good actor, he'd always whip around, look at me and say, "Well, I 'll be damned, there sure is."   If things got too boring if we were going somewhere in the truck he'd yank it over and drive in the ditch a ways.  He liked seeing my reaction.  This isn't the first time I've devoted space to Ed and won't be the last.  And why not?  He was a father figure, educator, sounding board, confidante and one of the wittiest guys I've ever been around.

I could not have scripted a better place to work, to have fun, to learn the virtues and ethics of labor all the while doing it within a small community of like-minded farmers.  And Uncle Ed?  He was and still is my teacher, friend, and that quiet voice of a time, long gone now, who whispers still with warmth to my soul.