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.. 1944 Even so, my father homesteaded 80 acres in 1916 as soon as he turned 21. When he married my mother, they moved into a ten foot by twenty foot board, one room house. THE BARN FRATERNITY Many are familiar with the Amish lifestyle. That's the way we lived when I was growing up. I was one of six children and next to the youngest. It was a big event when I was given my first formal chore at age five or six. When we reached that ripe age we began to milk one of the 20 or 30 cows we had. This coming of age gave me formal admission to the "barn fraternity". Some of my most cherished memories from my youth are the hours of singing and antics I shared with my four brothers during those twice-a-day milking sessions out in the barn. We had to milk before school in the morning, then again after school in the afternoon. Dawdling in the morning could mean a long trek to school afterwards if we missed the 'bus. The older we got the more animals we had to milk. Doing the milking with my four brothers was more fun than ~k. - We didn't have a rigid schedule except on Fridays when we had to finish up in time to hear the Hit Parade. We loved to sing together. When we heard a tune on the Hit Parade that we liked, we would get the nheet music and learn the song. Even today we are apt to break into song for the joy of it, - especially when'we're cruising down the highway. I know the cows had to eat. When I was little and we lived on my dad'S original 80 acre homestead, we kept the cows in a corral. I don't remember my dad feeding them, but he must have. We never seemed to run out of cows to milk. Thirty milking cows eat over 1000 pounds of hay daily. In those days, hay was kept loose in stacks. Feeding cows and young stock required that my dad pitch almost a ton a day with a pitchfork - every day. Animals don't take ,week ends off, and we didn't either. Something that made the week end special, though, was the weekly chicken we prepared for Sunday dinner. The minister was a frequent guest. Mom took care of the chickens. We also had pigs. The summer vegetable garden and the orchard provided family projects that fed us through the year. Mom ruled over the kitchen stove. The rest of us did the picking, plucking, peeling and cutting that canning requires. After the Depression, the California Nevada Land Bank had properties that people had abandoned. When I was about ten, Dad decided to move us to one of those properties. He chose one that was 1,000 acres of sagebrush and greasewood. Prior owners had put SO acres under cultivation. Dad leased the place. He share-cropped the SO acres. The Land Bank paid a premium at that time for every acre put under cultivation. Over a period of 3 years, we were able to get 200 acres into production. Dad bought one of the earliest tractors in 1938, but we still used draft horses for much of the farmwork. Sagebrush and greasewood had to be removed and burned. Ditches had to be dug for the irrigation water. Boxes had to be built for each of almost 200 irrigation checks to control the water flow onto the fields. (We were paid $.05 for each box we built.) Levees had to be built and maintained. Fielda had to be levelled to a 0.2 foot per 100 foot grade. We did it with transit and rod and by eyeball in those days. The final levelling happened after we let the water on the field the first time. If it tended to puddle in places, Dad used the tractor and scraper to move the soil. Alfalfa was the one crop that provided some cash. We stacked it into large wagons for the sometimes half-day, eight-mile trip into the mill. Alfalfa was ground locally in Fallon and marketed allover the world. In later years we baled the alfalfa instead of stacking it. I remember inhaling clouds of dust as I rode behind the baler to wrap two precut wires around the bale. It required practice and skill to get the bale wired before it began to expand as it left the baler. Once it expanded the wires wouldn't go around the bale, and that was trouble. I had about a minute to get the bale wired. Breathing the dust behind the baler was enough to turn anyone off on farming. Haying time was a time for neighbors to work together. At the new place we had space for the cows to graze. That meant someone had to go get them when it was milking time. As a ten year-old I liked the responsibility of taking the horse the quarter mile to retrieve the cows and herd them back for milking. It was another milepost on my way to manhood. 364 i , i I I; ii'. i ",~ Ii' ;:' I' i