When Horses Pulled the Plow: Life of a Wisconsin Farm Boy, 1910–1929

Epilogue: Back to the Farm, 1943–1944

165 Epilogue Back to the Farm, 1943– 1944 Fourteen years after my last summer on the farm in 1929, I unexpectedly found myself back on the farm as its operator and then as its owner. The event that prompted my return was the death of my father on June 23, 1943, after being kicked in the chest by one of the horses he was hitching to a piece of farm equipment. I had spent the first six of those fourteen years as a student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I earned a bachelor’s of science degree in 1932 with a major in agricultural journalism and an equal amount of work in soils, and a master’s of science degree in 1933 in agricultural journalism. I was then recruited to be in a graduate program in rural sociology at the university. The last year of the program was at the University of Minnesota. I expected to return to Madison to work on my doctoral dissertation. But my major professor had other plans for me. He had already arranged for me to join the faculty at what is now called the Colorado State University at Fort Collins. This opportunity had opened up after a rapid expansion of 166 federal funds for sociological research into problems associated with the Great Depression. I was in the Department of Economics, Sociology, and History, starting as assistant professor. After three years, in September 1938, I received an unexpected offer to be regional sociologist in a new office being opened in Amarillo, Texas, by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics. I was to be the leader for the program of the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life. The region included Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and parts of Oklahoma and Texas. Late in 1939, I was invited to Washington, D.C., to direct a nationwide study of Farm Security Administration borrowers, research for which funds had already been approved. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the nation’s efforts were directed at winning the war. Men were called into military service, including some of my acquaintances in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The programs of the department were all directed toward supporting the war effort, including setting production goals for food and ensuring a supply of labor to produce the food. A nighttime blackout was imposed on the Washington area. Some, including me, were trained to detect poison gas. When the government decided to decentralize some of its activities, I was moved in 1942 to Cincinnati, Ohio, to continue my working association with the Farm Security Administration’s national staff, most of whom were moved to Cincinnati. Some of my professional colleagues and friends, about my age, were volunteering for military service. In the spring of 1943, I applied for a commission in the U.S. Navy, through the recruiting office in Cincinnati. I was hoping I would be placed Epilogue 167 in military government as some of my colleagues in sociology had been. By this time, I was married and had a two-year-old son. In midJune , the three of us went to visit my parents on the farm, before I went into service. Soon after our return, a call came saying my father was in the hospital. I immediately went back to Edgerton and found that he had no chance of surviving. This was the first year in all my father’s years of farming that he did not have a hired man. A few days after the funeral, my commission came through. I explained the situation to the naval recruiting officer. He recommended that I contribute to the war effort by going back to the farm. In the space of a few days, I had taken leave from my position in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, moved our household goods back to the farm, and put on my overalls and taken up where I had left off fourteen years earlier, except in a different role. Now I was the decision maker. A neighbor’s son had just graduated from high school. His father offered to let him work for me as a monthly hired man. At haying time I persuaded Nick, who so often worked for my father on a standby basis, to help out. When a neighbor saw the corn needed cultivating...