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Blue Silos on the Prairie
- Minnesota Historical Society Press
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Blue Silos on thePrairie HAYING WITH SWATHER, TRACTOR, A N D CHOPPER Larry Hoffbeck, Danish American Morgan, Redwood County, 1984 My brother Larry always wanted to be a carpenter, to work with wood-cutting it, crafting it, shaping it into cabinets, bookshelves, even buildings. Woodworking was hisjoy, and he wanted it to be his livelihood. Although he was the oldest, he hadn’t been groomed to assume control of the farm on that distant day when our dad would retire. There were fivemore boys-me, then Jeffrey, Dana, Chris, and John. Dana showed the most interest in the place and would be old enough to take over the farmstead by the time our father stopped farming, so Larry was free to choose his field of work on graduation, and what he wanted to do was carpentry. Born in 1950,Larry was a so-called baby boomer, but he learned how to work on the farm as if he were from Dad’s generation. He knew how to feed the cows, pitch manure from the calfpens, and hoe the cockleburs and other weeds out of the soybean fields.And he knew how to , make the most of his free time. On those long summer nights, we played softball in the large yard south of the I , - , I I \ I I Ourfamily farm, shown here underWvina E. Hofbeck c/o Ray Hoffbeck," sits nearthenortheastern cornerof ThreeLakes Township,RedwoodCounty, as shown in this detailof theplat, 2977 I Page139:Hay swatherfike those used in the 2980s. 140 [3.144.187.103] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:12 GMT) Blue Silos on the Prairie 141 ropes in the hayloft, shot baskets through a homemade hoop. We raced our bikes on the gravel driveway and reenacted Civil War battles , shooting at each other with cap pistols, feigning death by falling down and counting to ten. Because Larry was skilled with hammer and nails, he also loved building tree houses. One of his most ingenious, constructed in the east part of the grove in a tree over the cowyard, had a four-pane window and a floor with a trapdoor. In the west portion of the same grove, Larry built a dugout house, underground. None of us ever worried that the roof of reused two-by-fours might collapse, though we knew we’d shoveled enough dirt on top to suffocate us under an avalanche of dust and lumber, if it did. It was simply unthinkable that one of Larry’s creations would be anything but safe and solid. Soon after graduating from Morgan High in 1968,Larry became a carpenter’sassistant to Christ Kruse from nearby Wabasso.A devastating June tornado had swept through the neighboring town of Tracy, destroying homes along a four-block swath and killing seven people. Larry worked with Kruse to build secure shelters for the storm’s victims and to repair buildings. He liked the work of helping rebuild Tracy in part, I suppose, because it seemed light-years away from other scenes of destruction in 1968.The North Vietnamese had attacked US. troops in South Vietnam during the Tet Offensive; Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated; rioting and protests erupted in citiesand on college campuses across (L to R)ABS technician talks withJohn,Jessica, and Larry,July 1982. 142 The H A Y M A K E R S the country. Knowing he was eligible for the selective service, Larry feared that the war might claim him, too. Other young men from Morgan had already gone to Vietnam, and two of them, Paul Basballe and Tom Kiergaard, were from the same country church that we attended. Another neighbor, a German Catholic named Ron Kerkhoff, wrote to the Morgan Messengerfrom Vietnam, telling everyone that he had “lost a lot of buddies during the fighting.” He admitted that “everybody”in his outfit was “halfscared to death including me.”No wonder Larry suspected that he too would soon be called up. What he didn’t anticipate, however, was a different kind of tragedy.’ In late November of that year, our dad was still trying to complete the work of gathering in the soybean crop in the field just north of the family farmstead.g His early-1950s McCormick combineharvester still worked well enough, but its safety features were outmoded . The combine got its power from the tractor via a PTO shaft, and old-fashioned steel shields were all that formed a flimsy hood over the rapidly whirling metal...