Farm Girl (4 page)

My parents moved there two weeks before I was born in 1917. They kept the old place and hired someone else to work the land. Uncle Ford’s farm joined ours, so he and my dad often worked together.

Our farm was eight miles from the closest town, Inavale, which was very small, only 120 population. Our post office was in Inavale, and the mail carrier usually managed to deliver the mail in all kinds of weather, the mail routes being kept in better condition than some of the other roads.

Our house on the farm was two stories plus a basement. In the basement was a pressure tank. Water would run from the windmill into that tank, and from the pressure tank it would be pumped into the bathroom and kitchen. We could flush the toilet, very unusual at that time. Most people didn’t have running water in the house or an indoor toilet.

Upstairs in the bathroom was a clothes chute that went down the basement to a basket. Mother had her washing machine down there, an electric one with a ringer. She’d rinse clothes in the big concrete tubs of rinse water, then run them through the ringer and rinse them again if necessary. We hung the clothes out to dry on the heavy wire fence that surrounded the yard. She had a clothesline, but that was outside the yard so she always just hung them on the fence. In the windy Nebraska weather, the clothes dried fast.

The fence had a wide, wire gate that opened for coal to be brought into the coal bin down the basement. We didn’t use the coal furnace much, because the kitchen cookstove kept us warm. It used corn cobs and to hold the fire we’d use coal.

We mainly lived in the kitchen during the winter. I had a bed in my parents’ room off the kitchen and slept there when I was younger. When I did sleep upstairs, I didn’t want to be up there by myself, so Mother would sleep up there with me. I’d dress downstairs and run up to bed, it would be so cold.

For hot water, Dad had an oil heater in the basement that he lit on Saturdays for our baths. One time he lit it and it exploded, catching the kerosene tank on fire. Dad grabbed the burning tank with his bare hands, carrying it up the basement stairs and outside before anything else caught on fire.

His hands had to be completely bandaged, with Arnica salve to help relieve the pain. I’d help Mother change the bandages and saw the skin peeling. He couldn’t work for at least two weeks, so Mother had to milk the cows and put the hay out for the animals. Uncle Ford did any other work for Dad during that time.

Under the basement stairway a Lolley engine ran the power to give us electricity. It was a half basement, the other half was just dirt under the house. An area about two feet high under the floor joist and the finished basement, Mother used for storage of boards, old dishes and pans, things she didn’t want to throw away. She hid it with a curtain, so we always called that area “under the curtain.”

One thing about our house different from most farmhouses was a tunnel going from the basement to a storm cave. In case of a tornado, you could get to the storm cave from the outside or through the tunnel. When Mother was a little girl, her family’s sod house was destroyed by a tornado, so she always feared them and wanted us to be able to get to safety quickly.

One half of the storm cave had a lot of glass-sided batteries, about six inches wide and ten inches long, full of liquid, to store the electricity from the Lolley engine. After about fifteen years, the engine wore out, then my dad put a wind charger on top of the granary, and that charged the batteries and ran the electricity.

Aunt Bernice, one of my dad’s sisters, had an Electrolux refrigerator that ran on kerosene. Mother wanted one of those so badly, but they cost $350, a lot of money back then, and my dad didn’t think it was worth it. We had 32V electricity that ran a fan, washing machine, lights and a radio, but it wasn’t enough for a refrigerator. Instead, we used an ice box. Finally, in 1950, Mother got the 120V electricity when the REA lines were built through our rural area, and she bought an electric refrigerator.

The first car I remember was a Hupmobile touring car with a canvas top and no windows, just open on the sides. In the winter my father would snap on canvas curtains with ising glass windows so the driver and passengers could see out. Those curtains helped to keep out most of the rain, wind or snow. For real cold weather we kept a bearskin in the back seat to put over our legs for long drives, like to Red Cloud fourteen miles away.

The speed limit was 45 miles per hour, but on the dirt country roads my father only drove 20-25 mph if they were dry. When it rained, the roads turned to mud and became slippery, then Dad put chains on the wheels and drove even more slowly. We tried never to drive on muddy roads or go anyplace if it looked like rain. More than once the car slipped into a ditch on one of the hilly roads close to home. If my parents couldn’t get it out, we’d walk home, then Dad took a team of horses and equipment back to pull the car out of the ditch.

On rare occasions, maybe two times a year, we drove to Hastings forty miles away, the biggest town anywhere near us, population about 10,000. Sometimes my parents needed to see the eye doctor there; or if Aunt Bernice was coming in from Lincoln on the train or the bus, we went to pick her up at the station. Once in a long while, during the winter when there wasn’t much farm work and if the weather was good, my parents and I would drive to Hastings just for fun, to spend the day.

We left early in the morning as it took over an hour to drive there. On the way we crossed over the Oregon Trail that so many covered wagons traveled back in the early 1800’s. I saw the old wagon wheel ruts crossing a pasture and thought about the hardships and adventures of those early travelers. Another place we passed was the fancy home of the man who had invented Kool-Aid.

One thing I liked about going to Hastings was eating in a restaurant. One restaurant had meals for forty cents. Another time when I was about six or seven, we went to a cafeteria where we picked up the food we wanted. Dad was ahead of me and Mother behind me. I liked everything I saw and filled my tray with lots of things. My dad just laughed and let me take whatever I wanted. Mother knew I had more than I could eat, so she didn’t take much. I took about a dollar’s worth of food, more than my dad had. I ate only a small portion, so Mother had plenty after all.

One winter we drove to Hastings with the side curtains on our Hupmobile. A cousin, Mildred Lutz, came along. On the way home, driving through the little town of Holstein, the sun shone in my dad’s eyes and he didn’t see a car turning in front of him. We collided and I ended up on the floor. Mildred would have been thrown out, but she got caught between the side curtains and the car. No one was hurt, just shaken up, because we were going so slowly, and soon we were on our way again.

When I was three, Dad and Uncle Ford dug a big hole back of the shop and were putting cement in. Ford was shoveling and I got in his way, wanting to see what they were doing like I always did, and the scoop shovel hit me right above the eye and cut a big gash.

They were building a cement foundation for the ice house. The foundation went two feet above ground, then a frame over that, with a door in one end. The door opened on the enclosed end where the frame was taller and went to a point.

In the winter when the ice got deep on the pond, Dad and Ford would cut ice and load it on the horse-drawn wagon, insulated by straw. They’d layer the ice and straw in the ice house clear up to the top, then heap it with gunny sacks and straw. All summer we’d have that ice. Mother would go out there with the wheelbarrow to get a block of ice for the refrigerator, or ice box, on the back porch.

One time Dad and Uncle Ford got the idea that snow would work just as well. They got snow that was heaped up along the banks and shoveled it into the ice house, with straw all around it. Then Mother shoveled snow into a gunny sack and put it in the ice box. She eventually moved the ice box from the back porch to the basement because the snow was messier than the ice.

When we wanted to freeze ice cream, we’d just scoop the snow into the ice cream freezer along with the salt. You wouldn’t have to break it up like you did the ice. Once they decided on snow, they always used snow.

Mother had to work pretty hard to get that snow out of the ice house, especially when it would get down deep near the end of summer, but she would do it without any help. She took great pride in being strong and able to lift heavy things. She could lift a fifty pound sack of sugar and carry it down the basement. She was nearly as tall as my dad, but pretty, too, with lots of reddish-gold hair piled on her head.

My dad’s hair was black and thick. I had dark hair like my dad but no curls. My hair was straight as a stick, and I wore it cut to chin-length with bangs that went across. I never thought I was pretty, but that didn’t bother me. I was too busy playing or helping my dad to worry about how I looked. My parents had made this farm where we had a comfortable home and everything we needed. I felt like they could do anything.

I was born at home at that new farm house, the doctor coming from Campbell. He had a nurse with him, and my parents had her stay two weeks to help take care of Mother and me. I was nearly two months old before I was named, because my parents couldn’t decide.

Dad wanted to name me Peggy, but Mother didn’t like that saying, “The other children will call her ‘Piggy’ in school.”

So Dad said, “Well, name her whatever you want then.”

Mother couldn’t decide until quite a bit later, then she saw the name Lucille in a book and decided to name me that. Edna was given as the first name and Lucille the second, but I was always called Lucille. I never liked the name Edna, although I liked the fact that my initials spelled “ELM,” a nice, strong, beautiful tree.

When I was twenty-one and attending the University of Nebraska, often when walking home, I’d go by way of the main floor of the Nebraska State Capitol Building past an office that said “Birth Certificates.” One day I decided to stop there and see if I could look up my birth certificate. I told the secretary my name, but she couldn’t find it.

She said, “Come look for it yourself,” and as I was searching through the file, I saw a birth certificate with the name “Baby Girl Marker” with my parents’ names on it.

I took a pen and wrote my name, Edna Lucille Marker, on my own birth certificate.

Baby Lucille held by the nurse who came to help

Self portrait of Julia Walstad, 1910

Chapter Four:
Mother and Me

Mother was very ambitious. She often had the recurring dream of flying, with everyone watching her and wondering how she did it. She wasn’t a very social person, expressing herself mainly through writing and art. When I was in eighth grade, one girl at school had a paint-by-number set, and that’s what I wanted. When we went to town, I got one but never finished it.

When I was living in Lincoln, Mother wrote that she finished my painting, liked it and bought another one. And that started her painting again.

Her cousin Telia Erickson lived about three miles away and did oil painting. Mother watched her and talked to her about it. She bought the kind of board and canvas that Telia used and started painting.

Mother always worked downstairs in the basement on the small oval table by the coal bin. She said once she had done 2000 paintings, many of them sold through a store in Minnesota.

During the Depression, the Omaha World Herald wrote a big article about Mother trading her paintings all over the country for different things, trading through the mail with people in other states. She often said that her paintings hung in every state in the nation.

At first she bought her boards from an art company in Chicago and her canvas mounted on frames. Then she thought, Why pay all that money, I can do this myself. She cut the wood, making the frames the size she wanted, then nailed canvas on the frames with a certain glue to process it. She worked in the shop across from the ice house. When the canvas dried, she’d take it down the basement and paint on it.

Mother figured out how to do a lot of things herself. She never doubted her ability to do anything.