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Some miscellaneous memories of the farm:

There were several kids around all the time. I mentioned Alvin (Floyd’s brother) who had kids. Floyd also had a sister named Beatrice. Her husband was Kenneth and he was a Chemical Engineer. I was so impressed by Uncle Ken. Ken would go off and work in Saudi Arabia for a year or more at a time. For some reason, he liked me and we always got along really good. His daughter Sharon (who was my cousin) was about my age and we did a lot together. She was probably my first crush. Well, maybe not the first. So, it was not unusual for several of us kids to be on a wagon going somewhere to pick up a load of something. I can picture us travelling through the back roads of the countryside with several of us kids on the wagon. What I did during these trips was to tell stories to the other kids. I don’t really remember any of the stories, but I think they were variations on the Freddy the Pig stories I read when I was sick. I’ve always wanted to be a writer and I think that was the beginning of that desire. Too bad, I never did anything with it.

Another thing I remember from the farm is being stung by a wasp. Not an earth shaking event, but just something I remember and that’s the purpose of this blog. One of my jobs was to clean out the barn after the cows were milked. You had to hook up a manure spreader onto the back of the tractor and then back the whole thing into the barn where the cows had stood when they were milked. The cows were gone now, all that was left was the manure. So I would back the spreader into the barn and then get a shovel and spend the next half-hour picking up the manure and throwing it into the spreader. Once it was all picked up or the spreader was full, you drove out to a field and “spread” it. The spreader had these spike like things in the back that rotated round and round and it would throw the manure out onto the ground. There was a conveaor belt in the spreader which moved the manure towards the back until it was all thrown out.

The spreader had a tongue on the end of it that connects to the tractor. To actually connect the two, you have to back up the tractor until it was touching the spreader tongue and then get off the tractor and lift up the tongue and hook it to the little ball on the tractor. Sort of like hooking up a trailer to a car or truck. Anyway, when I went to grap the tongue, there was a wasp under it and he didn’t like being grabbed. He stung me in the hand and then flew away. I’ve heard that wasps die when they sting someone, I don’t know, but I hope so. My hand swelled up and I couldn’t use it for several days. After that I always looked before I took hold of the spreader or a wagon tongue.

Yes, memories are great.

Dad

I mentioned in the last post Martin and Laura. They were Floyd and Mom’s only children. Martin was born first apparently while we were still living in Battle Creek. Laura was born a couple years later. They were and have always been very close as brother and sister. I was never too close to them, but we are on good terms. I wish I had more contact with them. Floyd always wanted someone to follow in his footsteps. He knew it would never be me and so he turned to Martin. Unfortunately, he died before that really happened, so Martin never became a farmer either. I remember when Laura was born how mad Floyd was that it was a girl. A girl can’t help him on the farm. He wanted only boys. It was sad, but this was the 50’s and that’s the way they felt about things. As you know Martin now lives in Maine with his wife Sue and Laura still lives in Battle Creek. She married once, but I don’t think she ever married the guy she lives with now. Maybe we’ll talk more about that when we get to that point in the history.

Floyd pretty much made me do everything that he did except on a smaller scale. He was big guy, 6′ 5” at least and he weighted like 350 pounds. A really hugh man that you just didn’t mess with. I asked my Mom one time how she could possibly stay with this brut, and she told me he was the gentlest man she had every known and he made her very happy. At the time, that didn’t make me feel too much better, but as I look back on it, I’m very grateful for Floyd. I’m grateful for the love he showed my mother and for the way he raised me, even though I didn’t like it at the time.

Not sure if you’re all aware of it, but I am sealed to Floyd and my mother in the temple, so that makes him more my dad than my real dad. So, like it or not, he is part of our family. And I think that is a good thing. He was basically a good man. He only hurt me once and he definitely had reason. If I had been him, I’d have beat me every day just for principle since I was such a snot to him. I can remember it like it was yesterday, we were standing out on the lawn and he had given me a job to do. (weed the garden, I think). I told him I didn’t want to do it. He said essentially, he didn’t care what I wanted, that was what he wanted me to do. So I got really mad and said something about how fat he was. (”I don’t take orders from a fatso.”) (He really wasn’t – he was just very big). Anyway, it was an insult and I could tell I had hurt him. Before I knew what happened, he reached out and slapped me hard on the cheek. Down I went to the ground. I was so stunned, I didn’t know what to do. He just frowned at me, said something about getting to work and walked away. I hurried to do the weeding that he had asked me to do. That is the only time in the four years I lived on the farm that he struck me and I really felt like I deserved it.

I always say that I came to the farm a selfish self-absorbed spoiled city kid who thought the world revolved around him. I came away, four years later, a young man who had grown up and now respected work and was able to do work and respected other people and was able to get on with my life in a meaningful way. I knew I didn’t want to stay on the farm after I graduated, but I have much to thank Floyd for. I’m very grateful he came into my life.

In the summer between my Sophomore and Junior year (1958), I couldn’t stand the thought of another summer bailing hay and working 14 hours a day in the sun. I talked my Dad into letting me come live with him in Battle Creek. I also had to talk my mother into letting me go. (Maybe I should have been a saleman). At any rate, I joyfully moved out of the farm and into Battle Creek to live with my Dad, his wife Dorothy and his daughter Linda. Linda was several years younger then me, but we got along pretty well. The person I didn’t get along with was Dorothy. She hated me almost as much as I hated Floyd. (Step-parents just don’t always work out very well.) I managed to stay the summer and since I was in the Pennfield School district, I applied there for 11th grade. I had actually started class in the fall when it became apparent that I couldn’t stay at Dad’s any longer. I talked to my Mom about it and we decided to move me back to the farm. As it turned out, our property was on the border of the Pennfield school district and if I walked about 1/2 mile down this road, I could catch a bus into Pennfield from the farm. Now, I don’t remember if I told Pennfield I had moved or if they believed I still lived in their district. At any rate, they let me stay at Pennfield and for my final two years of high school, I rode an hour each way on a bus to go to Pennfield.

That was a good experience. The only two teachers I remember from high school, were both in Pennfield. I only remember one of the names and that is Mr Oakes. He was my math teacher. I can still picture him in my mind. He started a math club and I was the president. When I trace back my love of mathematics, it all goes back to Mr Oakes. Teachers can have tremendous effects on kids lives. The other teacher, whose name I can’t remember, I’ll have to find my year book, was my senior English teacher. As most of you know, I was the valdictorian of my class. That was in large part due to the grades I got at Belleview which was a far easier school than Pennfield. I often wonder if I had spent four years at Pennfield, if the end result would have been the same. I hope so, but who knows. As valdictorian, I had to write a speech for graduation. So, I sat down and wrote my best work about ending one era of our lives and starting a new one. All that crap. I showed it to my English teacher who was my advisor on the speech and she said, in effect, it was biggest pile of crap she had ever seen. She said, “We can do much better than that” and proceeded to re-write my graduation speech. If I can find a copy of it, I’ll include it on this blog. But the Vietnam war was just starting and she had a lot to say about that. It was pretty strong and I remember there was a long silence after I finished speaking before everyone started clapping. I think I shocked them a little. This was 1960 and kids didn’t talk like I did in the speech. Of course, it wasn’t me talking, it was the teacher.

Floyd died on Sept 20, 1962 while I was in the Air Force about 2 years after my leaving home. He was out in the back yard at the grandma’s house working on a tractor, when he suddenly just fell over. He was in a coma for three days and then died, never waking up. They said it was a blood vessel in his brain that burst and killed him. Probably a result of his size and blood pressure. He had just turned 46. My mother, Martin and Laura couldn’t stay on the farm after Floyd died, so they moved back to Kelley Street. I was in the Air Force at the time and decided that this was a good excuse to get out early. I applied for a early discharge on the grounds that I needed to go home and take care of my mother (called a hardship discharge) and they granted it. In Jan 1965, I returned to Kelley Street for the first time in about 10 years.

Dad

I have just downloaded and installed the PAF software that the church provides for people who do family history. I loaded in my file for the Hoag family and looked at it for the first time in a few years. I guess my memory isn’t as good as I thought it was. My mother married Floyd on Feb 6, 1954 which is about 2 years earlier than I was thinking. I would have been 11, set to turn 12 later than year. This would have been the winter after I had rheumatic fever. I don’t remember any of that. I do know that we didn’t move to the farm until the summer between my 8th and 9th grades (because I know what schools I attended.) That should have have been the summer of 1956, since I graduated in 1960. Go back 4 years and you get to 1956. So, we lived in Battle Creek for about 2 years before moving to the farm. My brother, Martin, was born Mar 4, 1955, so he was born in Battle Creek. Laura, my sister, was not born until April 14, 1957. So we were on the farm by this time.

I hope someday to give everyone a copy of the history of my family as we are instructed to do in the church. This dialog will accompany that.

I’ll get back to the history tomorrow.

Dad

Down the road from Grandma’s, Floyd’s brother Alvin lived in a third farm. They had quite a little empire. Alvin had a son named Dick who was my age and turned out to be one of my best friends through high school. He hated the farm almost as much as I did. He was really into music (rock and roll was just starting). I was a reader. This was before I started getting interested in music myself. We would have endless arguments (friendly) about what was better, records or books. Turns out, I ended up liking both of them. I never saw Dick after we graduated from school, but I later heard he was gay. I bet that made the Kader’s happy. Looking back, I can sort of see that happening, but at the time, it would have never entered my mind that he was leaning that way.

The house we lived in had electricity and running water, but for the first couple years, there was no toilet. We had to go out back to an outhouse that stood 50 yards or so from the back door. And remember, this was Michgan and in the winter, you had to shovel a path through the snow to get to the outhouse. It was fun!!! My mother finally put her foot down and made Floyd build a real indoor toilet. We were so happy when that was finished and I could take showers and be warm. That was the first time we had hot running water, too. Before that, all hot water had to be heated on the stove and dishes and faces were washed from the same big bucket-like container that always sat on the stove with water in it.

We also didn’t have central heat. We had a wood-burning stove that stood in the dining room and supplied heat for the entire house. There was a cooking stove in the kitchen, but that didn’t heat too much unless you were standing right over it. My bedroom was upstairs and in the winter time, I depended on what heat would rise up through the exhaust pipe that passed through the wall of my bedroom. I would wake up in the morning to get ready for school and I could see my breath in my bedroom. It really makes you hurry to get dressed and get downstaires where it’s warm.

Since we used wood burning stoves, a lot of the time we spent every year was gathering wood. A couple hundred acres of our land was woods and we would get on the tractor, pulling a little wagon behind and go into the woods looking for trees that had fallen down and could be cut up in pieces for burning. Floyd would take a chainsaw and cut the logs into round pieces and then it was my job to take an ax and split the round pieces into wedge shaped pieces that would fit in the stove. I would prop the larger piece of wood against a tree stump or another piece and then, holding the piece with my boot, bring the ax down and split the wood. Every pair of shoes and boots I owned had little cuts in the toe of the shoe where the ax hit the shoe instead of hitting the wood. It’s a wonder I still have all my toes and didn’t cut something off.

We would collect the wood on the wagon and when that was full, we’d haul it back to the house and stack it outside where it would wait until we needed it. A daily task was going out to the woodpile and bringing in a hugh armful of wood to stack next to the stove to be burned. This was something we did every day, sometimes, several times a day all winter long.

You collected wood in the winter time because in the summer you were busy with other crops. We grew hay to feed the cows. We grew wheat and corn (who knows what for). I think the animals ate those, too. In the summer, I would ride along on a big hay wagon that was attached behind a hay bailer. The hay would be picked up by the machine (Floyd doing the driving), the machine would form the hay into bails (weighing about 75 pounds each) and spit them onto the wagon that was hooked on the back where I was riding. Well, unless someone picked up the bail and stacked it neatly on the wagon, after 2 or 3 of them, they would fall off on the ground, so it was my job to collect the bails and stack them on the wagon. Not too hard for a 16 year old, but pretty miserable, just the same. Once the wagon was full, we would return to the barn where a long conveaor belt thing would carry the bails up into the barn where they were stacked again. If all went well, you grew enough hay to feed the cows through the entire winter. If the crop fell short, then you could be in trouble if it was long winter and you didn’t have enough feed for the cattle. There were years when we had to buy hay to finish out a winter because the barn was empty and the cows still needed to be fed. This hurt profits and made everybody unhappy.

Dad

The Kader’s had a working farm. In fact, they had three of them. I don’t know the total acreage, but it was around 600 acres. We grew all sorts of things, but the biggest deal was the milk cows. Every day, twice a day, we milked between 75 and 100 cows in the big barn at my grandma’s place. One of the jokes (not funny) about farming was that we could never take a vacation because the cows needed to be milked twice a day and they couldn’t wait.

Let me explain the setup. We lived on one farm. It had a barn and a big garage where Floyd would work on stuff like tractors and the car once in a while. There was a long driveway leading from a dirt road up to the house, so you could see people coming a few seconds before they actually got there. I had to walk out to the main road to get picked up by the bus to ride into Belleview for school and to get the mail.

Up the road about 200 yards was Floyd’s father and mother’s place. They were, of course, grandpa and grandma. I can still picture the kitchen and the dining room. Go get a copy of some 50’s TV show that takes place on a farm and you’ll see just what it looked like. They also had a big barn and this was really the center of all the action. This is where we milked and did pretty much everything important. They had pigs and chickens that had eggs that needed collecting everyday. A real, old fashioned working farm. They made their own cheese and of course we had fresh milk from the cows. Have you ever tasted warm milk straight from a cow. Not good. It’s much better out of a bottle after it’s been processed and cooled. We also butchered the cows once in a while to get meat. It was my job to round up the cow (I think I had a dog that helped). Once I got the cow into position, they would tie a rope around his hind legs and then through a pulley system. Then using the tractor, they would pull the rope until the cow was hanging upside side down with his hind legs up in the air and his head down. The cow is bellowing away and Floyd would come up to him with a sledge hammer and swing the hammer and connect with the cow – wak – right between the eyes. It usually only took one blow and the cow was dead. Then they cut his throat and let the blood drain and proceeded with the cutting to get him in pieces small enough to take into town. They had several freezers and we would kill the cows and then gut them and take the sides into town to a professional who would cut them up into the proper sizes and grind the meat for hamburger, etc. Then we’d bring home several hundred pounds of meat to put in the freezers for winter. Everyone at the three farms shared in all the meat. Everything you can get at the grocery store, we produced ourselves. I asked Floyd one day why he didn’t just shoot the cow and he said, in effect, why waste a bullet when the sledge hammer works just fine. Not sure how they do it today, but I’ll bet they use a gun or a needle to kill the cow.

More tomorrow….

Dad 

This is the first post of a long story that covers the four years I spent in high school. I have written out the basic story and will add to it as I think of new things, but this is fairly complete the way it is. Here is the first part:

It was the summer between my 8th and 9th grade in school (1956) that my mother married Floyd Elmer Kader. It took me at least five years before I could say I liked him. Maybe, I never did until he was dead, I don’t know. But the first few years were very rocky. I couldn’t understand why my mother needed someone else. This would be her third marriage and I thought she was making a big mistake. And to make it worse, he was moving us out to a farm near Belleview, Michigan. They decided not to sell the house on Kelley Street and ended up renting it out for the next several years. You’ll see how this was a good decision in the end. Everytime I go back to Michigan on a visit, I always go out and visit the farm area where I lived. The last time I did this (Barb and travelled out here a couple summers ago), the house I used to live in was gone. It looked like it burned down and there was a large trailer nearby that someone was living in. So, that part of my life is gone forever.

I don’t remember the actual marriage. I think they just went to a justice of the peace and it wasn’t any big deal. No church wedding or anything. They just came home one day and they were married. Floyd wanted us to move before fall school started so I could start at my new school in Belleview. You can imagine how I felt. Uprooted from the city where I was comfortable and taken to a foreign place where not only did I not know anyone, but now I was expected to pull my own weight as far as working on the farm was concerned.

Belleview High School was a typical farming community high school. I did OK there. I made two friends that I still think about every once in a while. Since I was pretty much what is today called a “nerd”, I attracted those types as friends. My best friend was a guy named Bob Harrison. He was a little over wieght (like me) and totaly clueless when it came to girls. I don’t think he dated in high school at all and I know he didn’t get married until he was in his late 20’s or 30’s. He lived with his Mom and Dad, of course. Later, his Dad died and I remember going over to his house and having just his Mom there. That was a weird feeling since I wasn’t used to loss and hadn’t experienced it much. Bob played the clarinet and loved Louie Armstrong. When I was at his house, we would play records and Bob would play along with the record. Later after he graduated from high school, he started hanging out with circus people. Whenever a circus would come to town, he would go down and talk to the band leader and ask if he could join the band for a couple numbers. They almost always let him. There was a place in Wisconsin where a circus would spend the winter (seems like a weird place – they should have been down south), but Bob would travel over there in the winter a couple times just to sit in with the band and practice with them. He never travelled with the circus that I know of, but he sure liked the music. A very strange guy, but he was my friend.

My second best friend was Dave Peters. He was another weird person. A born-again christian that carried a bible to school and tried to convert everyone he saw. He came from very strict parents who wouldn’t let him do anything. He couldn’t dance or listen to the radio or TV. I’m not sure why we were friends, but we were. He was always trying to convert me. It was the usual line about giving your life to Jesus. We don’t talk that way in our church, but it’s kind of the same principle. This was years before I knew anything about the LDS Chruch. We were in my bedroom at the farm and he wanted me to confess and turn my self over to Jesus. He’s been after me about this for months and I was tired of it, so I said OK. That’s all I said – just OK. He was so happy, he had got his first convert. He was the type of kid that would get picked on a lot in school, but nobody bothered me too much. I guess because I was pretty big. But as long as he hung out with me, no one bothered him either. When I get into the section about the Air Force, I’ll tell you a postscipt about Dave that happened while I was serving in Mississippi. We’ll do that later.

I spent two years at Belleview (9th and 10th grade – 1957 and 1958). Then I transferred to Pennfield-Dunlap in Battle Creek. We’ll get to that a little later.

Dad

This will be just a short post, but I wanted to document a friend we had while living on Kelley Street in Battle Creek. I’ve spent the last couple days trying to remember her name and finally did, so I wanted to put it down before I forget it again. Her name was Marvel Coleman and she lived across the street from us. She and my Mom were really good friends.

I can picture her house in my mind and I used to go over there with my Mother every once in a while. I can only remember two things about her. One, she was single and always would be. I’m sure she died an old maid. The second was that she collected copies of the song “My Blue Heaven”. That’s a famous 1940’s song written by Irving Berlin, I believe. She collected every different version of that song that she could find. It had been done by a lot of people, so she had a sizable collection.

I can’t help but wonder if that isn’t where I got the idea to collect music. Probably not, but who knows.

Dad