WHILE I WAS GROWING UP...
Introduction
I thought about adding an extra chapter at the end of The Kaeding Genealogy to relate several anecdotes about things that I remember from my youth. Part of the reason for writing a book about my family's history was to help pass this information on to my children and grandchildren. In reading and researching my ancestors, some of the most interesting reading was the stories about small things that had happened. So, while these anecdotes may not be very interesting now, hopefully, they will help my grandchildren better understand life here in the 1940's, 1950's and the 1960's ... while I was growing up.
This is the collection of stories that were included. I hope you find them interesting and informative about the little things that happened 40 to 60 years ago.
The Work
Horses and the Hay Ride
Church
The Old Baldwin Gleaner
Shocking and Threshing
Getting Lost in the Wheat
Feild
Going to School
The Farm
The Accordion Band
Fred's Store
Penn (Laurens)
The Work Horses and the Hay Ride
In the late 1940's and the early 1950's, dad still had three workhorses. Most of the farming was then being done with tractors, but he still used these horses for making hay. Two of them, in a team were hitched to a bull rake to windrow the hay. I don't remember how old I was, but one summer, dad decided to teach me how to drive the team and rake hay. Dad was in the same hay field loading the hay onto wagons. We were a mile east of the farmstead. Everything went fine for about two hours. Then the rake wheel hit a badger hole and swung back and forth, hitting the horses with the pole. They must have thought that I wanted them to go faster, so they did! They took off at a gallop, completely out of control. The team turned onto the road for home and didn't stop running until they were standing in front of the barn in the yard. What a ride!
For as long as I can remember, we attended church every Sunday at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Penn. There were only two churches in Penn, St. Paul’s and a Catholic Church. I would say that less than twenty-five families attended St. Paul’s. Many of those families are included in this book; the Edgar Kaedings, my grandmother, Helena, Fred Kaeding, the Edward Henkes, the Alfred Henkes, the Alfred Johnstons, and the Elmer Henkes, to name some of them. I haven't learned too much about the history of the St. Paul’s, but I would guess that the parents of these families probably founded it. My family always sat in the back row on the left side of the isle. Most of the families sat in the same place every Sunday. The children also attended Sunday school every Sunday. In the summer, we played in the church yard whenever we could and whenever their was a pot luck dinner. At Christmas, there was always a special program put on by the children and treats for us all afterward.
Vacation Bible School classes were held in the public school in June. One summer, we had a heat wave and the temperature was over 100 degrees every day. In the winter, the boys would sometimes go over to the public hall and play basketball after church. The hall was unheated and our lungs would burn from the cold when we finished. The boys in confirmation class were automatically the ushers during services. My class was the last to be confirmed, so I became a permanent usher until I grew up. In order to graduate from confirmation, my classmates and I each had to prepare and deliver part of a Sunday sermon. That was a nervous day! St. Paul’s closed a few years after I left for college, I believe. I guess all of the children moved away and the congregation stopped growing. But it was a great church to grow up with and brings fond memories.
The first combine I remember us having was a Baldwin Gleaner. It was a small, pull-type combine that dad pulled with the John Deere "D" tractor. Swathing was done with a 12 foot wide "left-handed" swather that dad had made over from an old shock binder. In comparison to today's self-propelled combines, able to pick up 24-foot wide swaths with ease, the Baldwin was really small. Harvest would take a month or more and the combine would only harvest 20 acres a day or less. Since a combine would pick up a rock occasionally, it had to have provisions to pass these rocks through the cylinder. On the Baldwin, this consisted of two small bolts that held the front of the cylinder pan in place. When a rock came through the machine, the bolts broke off and the cylinder pan fell off. Dad would then have to stop the machine and bolt the pan back on. The Baldwin had its own engine, but this engine was just used to drive the combine. It was not power take off driven like today's pull-type machines.
Dad had already switched to harvesting with a combine as far back as I can remember, but the neighbors used a threshing machine until into the early 1950's. So, I could see them bundling grain with a binder and setting up shocks every fall. The binder would cut the grain and "bundle" it into small piles, each tied together with a piece of string. These bundles would be dropped behind the binder as it went over the field. Then, a man would walk over the field, picking up the bundles and standing them up together in "shocks." After the grain had cured, the shocks would be loaded onto wagons and hauled to the threshing machine that would be set up at some central location. Here, the shocks and bundles would be broken apart and fed by hand into the threshing machine's receiver to be threshed. Ten or twelve men would work together to gather the shocks and feed the thresher. Before I was born, my dad and my uncle, Edgar, owned a thresher together and used to harvest first one farm and then another. They would hire the crews needed to run the machines and my mother, my grandmother, Helena, and my aunt, Vega, would have to cook for and feed these crews. My mother may not have done this cooking on our farm as she and dad were married in 1945 after dad had purchased the combine but she did work on the farm for a while before she and dad married.
Getting Lost in the Wheat Field
One day, the family was going to town shopping. This was a big occasion in the 1950's, since we only went shopping once every month or two. Dad was finishing up some harvesting on the quarter a mile east of the house. I was five or six years old. Mom, my brothers and sister were all ready - we were just waiting for dad to come in from the field. I was impatient, so I decided to walk out to where dad was working. To get there, I had to walk through a 40-acre wheat field that was ripe and ready to harvest. The wheat was taller than I was. After walking for awhile, I lost my directions and couldn't tell which way dad or home was. I was lost in the wheat! At first, I could hear the combine running and walked towards it. But dad finished and drove home - so I couldn't hear the combine any more. The sun was also going down. I was scared! Finally, I walked towards the sunset and found my way out of the wheat.
When I was six, I was ready to start school. I was supposed to attend the Pelican Township Grade School, but it was four miles away, so dad enrolled me in the Penn Grade School in Penn. The Pelican school stood on a hilltop on the prairie with nothing else around it. It had one room where all eight grades sat for classes. The Penn school was big in comparison. It was an old two-story high school building that had four classrooms and a science lab. But the grade school only used two of the rooms while I went there. The first four grades were in one room, taught by Mrs. Benson and the second four grades were in another room, taught by Mrs. Swenson. The science room, also on the main floor, was used as a lunchroom. We played in the schoolyard at recesses and at lunchtime, summer or winter. The schoolyard covered an entire city block. The school had a big bell in a bell tower on the roof. A rope came down to the main floor hall from the bell. Ringing this bell, which could be heard all over town, convened classes. If one pulled hard enough on the bell rope, you could roll the bell all the way over - tangling the rope up in the bell tower! No one was to do this - but we did on occasion anyway. Then the janitor would have to climb into the tower and untangle the rope.
Each grade had three to six students in it and we sat in rows, one row to a grade. My class started out with three students. By the fourth grade, one student in a higher class was held back and so my class was four until we finished the eighth grade. The teacher would spend part of each day instructing each grade and the rest of the time we worked on assignments. There was seldom any homework.
Dad's farm was eight hundred acres. It consisted of five quarters of land, four in one section and one in an adjoining section. A major gravel road, Ramsey County 2, ran along the west side of the farm going north and south. Penn, the nearest town, was two miles away to the north. All other sides of the farm were bounded by prairie trails along the section lines. The farm was on rolling hills (terminal moraine, in geological terms) with sloughs formed in the low spots and some almost barren land on the hilltops. In early years, almost the entire farm was fenced with three-strand barbed wire fencing. One area of about twenty to thirty acres was reserved as grass range for the livestock. This pasture was about in the middle of the section and was connected the farmyard with a fenced lane.
The farmyard was in the northwest corner of the section. At first, we had an old two-story house surrounded by a wood lot. Around the edge of the main yard, we also had a very large barn with a hay loft, a bunk house, a garage, a blacksmith shop, an outhouse, a wood shed, a machine shed and a tractor shed. Dad tore down the blacksmith shop when he connected a new tractor shed and wood shed together. Behind the tractor shed, there was a small brooder house that doubled as a smokehouse in the fall. The machine shed also had several granaries built in with it. Attached to the east side of the barn, dad built a cattle feeding shed and a straw shed to protect the livestock in the winter. Later, dad removed the straw shed and put up a wooden building to house the cattle. There was also a chicken coup east of the barn. Another machine shed and several granaries stood to the north of the main buildings. Dad built many of these buildings over the years and replaced some, but many of them are standing and in used today by my brother, Myron. We always kept livestock including the three work horses, two or three milk cows, twenty to thirty range cattle, hogs, chickens, turkeys, a dog, cats, and occasionally, ducks. We also raised a large vegetable garden every summer, so dad's was a fully self-sufficient and diversified farm! The range cattle would wander the pastures during the summer and pretty well take care of themselves, but in winter, we had to feed them every day and be sure that their water was not frozen over. The farm also had four gravel pits where the county would occasionally mine and buy gravel for road projects. Two of these had spring water in them and served as a neighborhood-swimming hole during the hot part of the summer.
Penn had a famous accordion band for many years. Its director was Tom Torrier (I'm not sure if this spelling is correct). The band was billed as the world's largest accordion band and it had over one hundred musicians in it - all playing accordions. In the early years of television, the band played on TV for Channel Six in Fargo at least once. It must have been a sight to see - and hear!
Uncle Fred owned and operated a grocery store and the post office in Penn. Besides providing foodstuffs for all of the people in the Penn area, Fred's Store was a favorite among all of the children in school. Whenever we had some money, a few pennies, a nickel or a dime, we would go to the store during our lunch break or after school to buy some candy or an ice cream bar. The post office was in the back in a separate room, with rows of postal boxes in the wall. Everyone in the community picked up their mail here before rural free delivery reached the area. The store had two isles and carried a wide variety of goods - almost like todays "7-Eleven." The store also had a back room and a basement where stocks were kept, but few people ever saw these rooms. We were privileged to see them once in awhile, since our uncle owned the store. Most of the weekly shopping in the community was done here since the next nearest store was in Churches Ferry, seven miles away.
Penn was the center of the farming community I grew up in. Its population was probably between 100 and 150 for most of that time. At one time in its past, Penn had been a thriving community, situated along the Great Northern Railway's main line. The town was first called "Laurens" according to an old land abstract I once read. Legend says that there once was a large hog farm on the edge of town whose owner would hold a dance every Friday or Saturday night. People commonly began to say "Let's go to the pens for the dance." This phrase supposedly led to the name being changed, finally, to Penn. I don't know that this story is fact - but it is interesting! Penn grew around the railroad stop until it had a bank, a hotel, an ice cream parlor, one or more stores, a tavern, a blacksmith shop, two garages, three grain elevators, a gas station, two churches, the school, and other businesses and buildings, including, of course, a passenger depot for the trains. Then, as happened to so many small towns, there was a major fire that burned down many of the buildings.
I remember the ice cream parlor and the hotel, which were both still doing business when I started school. The ice cream parlor closed and moved into the hotel lobby, I believe. Then, a few years later, the hotel also closed and it was eventually moved out of town to become part of a historic park (in Lakota?). The school closed after I graduated, the blacksmith shop has closed, the churches have both closed and a gas station by the highway burned down. The grain elevators have also closed now, so Penn is now a small bedroom community with people having to go to Devils Lake to work and shop. A convenience store and the tavern still remain in business.
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