Growing up on a Northwest Iowa Farm in the 1930s-1960s
Iowa Homestead Farm circa 1948
There was a generation in my family of cousins that grew up together in the 1930’s to the 1960’s. They shared many things in common. Most grew up on farms within twenty miles from each other in Northwest Iowa. Many received their elementary education in country schools two miles away from their farmsteads. All experienced the transition from horses to horsepower. With few exceptions, all grew up under the tutelage of two parent families. They were friends to each other during the many years of schooling and church participation. All were active members of their churches. Marvelously, they married spouses with similar lifestyles and values. All became responsible citizens and contributing members of society.
The passage of time has witnessed the passing of some of those cousins. The loss of their presence is a void for us today, knowing that they too could have contributed even more had their lives not been cut short.
It is with great honor and respect that we write these stories. Many have endured great hardships, survived overwhelming challenges, and made admirable achievements in their quiet productive lives. These stories are dedicated to them and many others who lived during this period of time in America. There are millions of todays older generation who lived similar lives. May these stories also be a tribute to their steadfastness and resilience.
They are the salt of the earth.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Norm Te Slaa
The passage of time has witnessed the passing of some of those cousins. The loss of their presence is a void for us today, knowing that they too could have contributed even more had their lives not been cut short.
It is with great honor and respect that we write these stories. Many have endured great hardships, survived overwhelming challenges, and made admirable achievements in their quiet productive lives. These stories are dedicated to them and many others who lived during this period of time in America. There are millions of todays older generation who lived similar lives. May these stories also be a tribute to their steadfastness and resilience.
They are the salt of the earth.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Norm Te Slaa
Story Index:
Prologue to Farm Stories
2. The Corncrib Butchery
1. The Bright Red and Blue Mobile Grocery Store
Prologue to Farm Stories
Growing Up on a Northwest Iowa Farm in the Middle Third of Twentieth-Century America
These stories, essays, and vignettes mostly describe rural family life from the 1930s to mid-1960s America.
We are the grandchildren of immigrants who left behind various Dutch provinces to come to America - traversing a vast ocean, leaving their farms and families, surviving an extended depression, and bearing front-row witnesses to World Wars I and II as well as and the Korean War, all to start a new life. We are the inheritors of such a legacy.
Their descendants shared similar Dutch backgrounds and espoused similar social and conservative political values. Their deeply held religious convictions guided their social order, and they held a deeply-rooted affinity for the earth. They lived through the transition from the power of horses to the power of tractors.
Information about our first generation, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American ancestors is sparse. We know more about our second-generation ancestors.
Most of these stories relay experiences of the third and fourth generations of our immigrant grandparents, those born in the middle third of the twentieth century. We are fortunate to be able to hear first-person recollections from some of people of these generations.
These are stories of experiences - not diaries - of a place in mid-America. They are presented as generic stories, most without the names of parents (referred to as Mom and Dad) or children. I do this so you can bring your own perspective to each story.
These stories are based on real events and circumstances. My hope is to share stories that uncover the challenges and spirit of these people, discerning their values, understanding their ethics and spirituality, and learning about them as people.
With the passing of our ancestors and contemporaries, so passes their histories. I hope these stories can lead to a deeper understanding of what rural life was during these years.
I welcome your participation in these stories. I hope you will be able to contribute details of their experiences to add greater depth, more facts and information, and more vivid color to each story. It need not be your personal experience, either. It could be a recollection of a grandparent, parent, or friend you’ve heard talk about the subject of any of these the stories.
Let me know if others in your family or friends would like to receive these stories, and I will include them in the story distribution list. I would love our children and grandchildren to respond to these stories.
Thanks to all of you. Let’s see where this will take us!
With respect and affection, Norm Te Slaa
These stories, essays, and vignettes mostly describe rural family life from the 1930s to mid-1960s America.
We are the grandchildren of immigrants who left behind various Dutch provinces to come to America - traversing a vast ocean, leaving their farms and families, surviving an extended depression, and bearing front-row witnesses to World Wars I and II as well as and the Korean War, all to start a new life. We are the inheritors of such a legacy.
Their descendants shared similar Dutch backgrounds and espoused similar social and conservative political values. Their deeply held religious convictions guided their social order, and they held a deeply-rooted affinity for the earth. They lived through the transition from the power of horses to the power of tractors.
Information about our first generation, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American ancestors is sparse. We know more about our second-generation ancestors.
Most of these stories relay experiences of the third and fourth generations of our immigrant grandparents, those born in the middle third of the twentieth century. We are fortunate to be able to hear first-person recollections from some of people of these generations.
These are stories of experiences - not diaries - of a place in mid-America. They are presented as generic stories, most without the names of parents (referred to as Mom and Dad) or children. I do this so you can bring your own perspective to each story.
These stories are based on real events and circumstances. My hope is to share stories that uncover the challenges and spirit of these people, discerning their values, understanding their ethics and spirituality, and learning about them as people.
With the passing of our ancestors and contemporaries, so passes their histories. I hope these stories can lead to a deeper understanding of what rural life was during these years.
I welcome your participation in these stories. I hope you will be able to contribute details of their experiences to add greater depth, more facts and information, and more vivid color to each story. It need not be your personal experience, either. It could be a recollection of a grandparent, parent, or friend you’ve heard talk about the subject of any of these the stories.
Let me know if others in your family or friends would like to receive these stories, and I will include them in the story distribution list. I would love our children and grandchildren to respond to these stories.
Thanks to all of you. Let’s see where this will take us!
With respect and affection, Norm Te Slaa
2. The Corncrib Butchery
It was breakfast time. Dad had just finished reading from the devotional tract “Living For Today” and a selected passage from Psalm 32. He closed the Bible and began an extemporaneous prayer.
He had silently prayed a similar prayer on his way to the barn early that morning, thanking God for the rain and asking Him for guidance and family protection. Now, seated around the Formica topped kitchen table, surrounded by red and white vinyl and chrome chairs, the family was discussing what would happen, now that the rain had changed their plans for their normal house, field and garden work. Everyone knew that the normal work for the day would have to be postponed because of the rain-soaked fields.
But there were choices!
After spring rains had stopped, the family often went to the field to pull cockleburs and other weeds. The entire family would labor in the wet fields under the warming sun and humid air. If that was not possible, the boys would often hand pitch manure from the barn pens into a manure spreader using four or five tine pitchforks, loading the spreader one pitchfork at a time until it was heaping full of manure, only to have another empty manure spreader show up at the barn door, waiting to be filled. When not working in the field or garden, the women would cook the meals, bake bread and pies, patch overalls, wash and mangle clothes [1], clean out the storm cellar, wax the floors, pull garden weeds, clean eggs and a myriad of other household chores that kept them busy throughout the day.
The family sat silently considering the alternatives. All the rainy-day work alternatives had little appeal to them on any day, rain or shine!
Dad shifted in his chair and broke the silence. “I was at the town locker yesterday and I counted only sixteen packages of frozen beef in our locker. What do you think about butchering dry cow number 37? She’s been a poor milk producer now for a year and hasn’t given any milk for the last three months. I think she is already nine years old.” The boys nodded in agreement. Since all the cows wore a chain with a number around their necks, the boys knew exactly the cow he was talking about.
The family glanced around the table. They knew butchering was hard work and would take the time of the entire family the better part of the day. On the other hand, butchering, whether beef, pigs or chicken, held its own drama and fascination for them. It was different from their daily work and even had some enjoyable aspects to it.
Mom nodded her head enthusiastically in agreement. “Last week I checked and counted what we had in our cellar. We have only twenty-four quarts of beef, sixteen quarts of chicken and forty quarts of pork left. If we don’t get more butchering done soon, we may have to buy meat from the meat market.” Dad seemed a bit surprised by the rapidly diminishing stock of canned meat. “It seems like only last winter since we butchered that 600-pound heifer who was paralized from a slip on the ice. Do you remember we had to carry her to the granary with the front-end loader?” he said.
The oldest boy, who was the most experienced of the boys, reminded everyone, “You know that once we decide to butcher the cow, it will take the entire day. There will be all the preparation before hand, then the butchering, the processing and the cleanup. But, I think we can get this done today.”
Dad listened intently. He knew what his son was saying and wondered what other work they would have to put off until later if they began the butchering today. The family seemed relieved that the unpleasant task of walking the beanfield, pitching manure or house work might be put off to a later, drier day.
He agreed with his son about the time commitment. He also knew that the heavy rain of last evening would take the ground at least two days to dry before any field work could be done. He quietly reminded himself of the remaining stocks of beef, pork and chicken. He knew it would last them barely eight more weeks.
The family’s thoughts shifted in anticipation to the smells and mouth-watering tastes of newly dried beef on freshly baked bread, smothered with butter in their lunchboxes and daily meals for the next six months. Dad’s eyes widened with the thought of sucking the salty marrow out of the freshly butchered, boiled bones. Their mouths watered with the thought of freshly fried bacon, liverwurst and balkenbrij [2] for their morning breakfasts.
Their salivating thoughts won out in favor of beginning the butchering, and the family nodded their approval to begin the hard work of butchering. Even so, it would be a fun and special day,
“Ok, we’ll butcher today but we need to get moving. To butcher Cow #37, we can make the preparations this morning so we can begin butchering and canning after dinner this afternoon. At this point in the life of this cow there is only one use for her – the meat!”
The family pushed back their chairs from the table and waited for Mom to read the Bible. They listened quietly as she read from 2 Timothy 2: 1-13. Dad prayed asking God for guidance and protection in the coming afternoon. He knew from experience many things could go wrong with butchering.
With devotions over, the family began a final review for butchering. Every member of the family knew their part. Each had a job based on their strength and experience. They knew they had to work fast to keep the meat fresh and clean. They knew that butchering, whether beef, pork or chicken, was always challenging and fast paced, but in a strange way, fun and exciting.
The family began to realize the heavy, hot and tiring work ahead of them and what it meant to put their butchering plans into immediate action. The women knew they would need more help. Mom rang up her sister and asked the telephone operator to be transferred to Cynthia. Minutes later Aunt Cynthia agreed and said she would be at the farm within an hour.
There were 135 quart jars to be washed and sterilized. The thirty-gallon oval shaped copper tub had to be fetched from the basement storage, cleaned and filled with water and prepared for boiling. Zinc Kerr lids, rubber seals and white waxed butcher paper had to be bought from the Middleburg store, three miles away. The hand meat grinder had to be cleaned and attached to the basement table to grind the meat scraps for ground beef. The three-burner kerosene stove in the basement needed to be filled with three gallons of kerosene. They would have to wait until dinnertime to light the burners to bring the tub of water to a boil. The flour sacks and old bed sheets they had been saving for weeks had to be washed, cut and sewn into fourteen-inch-long bags, ready for stuffing with spices and ground liver for liverwurst and head cheese. Another table had to be set up just next to a floor drain to clean and sanitize the linings of the intestine, later to be filled with ground meat and spices for baloney. The sausage stuffer had to be cleaned and brought to the canning area and attached to a table. Glass and metal pans had to be cleaned for fat cracklings, flour and spices for balkenbrij. An additional locker in town had to be reserved for any part of the new butchering which could not be put into the quart jars.
While all this was going on in the house, the farmyard too bustled with activity. Dad and the boys went into the cattle yard and culled out Cow #37 and herded it to to the loafing shed [3].
They carefully removed all water, feed and straw bedding so the cow could not eat the straw. A large tarp was laid across the corncrib floor. The block and tackle [4] was now readied to hoist the carcass to the rafters. They checked the ropes and rafter to see if it could hold the 1100-pound cow. They checked the rafters for any damage. They attached a one- and one-half inch steel chain to the block and tackle and tied it to the middle of corn crib rafters.
Dad brought the 22-gauge rifle from the gun rack in the hog house and laid it in a corner of the corn crib. One of the boys laid a bullet next to the rifle. Another boy carried five-gallon buckets of water to the corncrib to flush the blood and waste off the concrete floor before and after butchering. The granary floor was one of the few places on the farm where the butchering of cattle and pigs could take place. It was relatively clean with a concrete floor but still had to be swept and flushed with buckets of water before butchering began.
Meanwhile, one of the boys sharpened the butcher knives on a pedal-driven emery wheel [5] in the machine shed. Other boys carried handfuls of apple tree limbs to the smokehouse in the grove to prepare the brisket and one of the shoulders for smoked, dried beef. A meat locker in town was reserved for any butchering their food cellar could not hold.
As noonday approached, they were ready. The house and yard preparations for butchering had taken the entire morning. The family sat down for dinner. One of the boys prayed. On the table, Mom placed a bowl of beef gravy and a heaping bowl of mashed potatoes, crowned with a large dollup of butter. The girls followed with a large bowl of canned beef swimming in meat juice. Other bowls of garden beans, canned sweet corn and a small bowl of canned beets followed.
The family was quiet throughout dinner. Their minds occupied with the work they were about to do.
With dinner over, the family moved to their ‘stations’. The boys boxed Cow #37 into a corner of the loafing shed. Dad slipped a rope around its neck and wound it back over its snout, creating a halter-like control of the cow. Their trek to the corncrib began.
The cow was unaccustomed to being led by anything and mightily resisted any movement. It seemed to know there was something different the family had in store for her. The cow would not budge. The cow’s legs stiffened as she weaved and bobbed, making slow progress from the loafing shed to the granary. She had never before been subjected to such restrictions on her freedom of movement. One of the boys raised the tail of the cow ninety degrees, forcing the cow to move ahead, a trick he had learned from Grandpa Henry.
One of the boys went out to the outhouse and tore pages out of the Montgomery Wards catalog. He walked into the grove to the smokehouse and lit a smouldering fire under a pile of apple tree branches.
Mom, the girls and Aunt Cynth went to the basement and lit the kerosene burners. They gave one last pass over the emery board to sharpen the knives, and prepared the buckets for the meat, fat and waste.
The boys began to assemble the block and tackle. Mom and the girls watched with interest from the porch of the house as they pushed the cow up a slight incline and into the center of the granary. The boys attached two ropes to its neck, and they pulled the rope tight from opposite sides to keep her head steady.
It was time for Dad to do one of the most difficult jobs as a farmer…killing one of his animals. Grandpa had been a skilled teacher to Dad in the art of farmyard butchering. He too had felt pangs of remorse for this part of the butchering process.
Reluctantly, Dad picked up the 22-caliber rifle laying on the floor of the granary and inserted a bullet into the chamber. The cow’s eyes were wild with fright. The boys held the ropes tight from both sides of the cow’s head, not allowing any movement of her head. He placed the rifle muzzle between the eyes of the cow and pulled the trigger. Immediately, the cow fell limp on the corncrib floor, but the eyes of the cow remained open, as if accusing Dad of the ultimate betrayal.
Dad turned aside and breathed a sigh of relief, slowly placing the rifle on the floor of the corn crib.
The boys quickly attached the block and tackle to the hind legs of the cow. The pully system of the block and tackle allowed them tremendous leverage. With one end tied to the hind legs of the cow and the other end tied to the joist of the granary, and inch by inch, they pulled up this half-ton-plus animal toward the rafters. The rafter creaked and groaned as the back hooves of the cows approached the rafter. When the hooves touched the granary joist, the cow now stretched twelve feet from the rafter to the concrete corncrib floor, with her snout only inches from the floor.
Stretched out, she seemed to be a much larger animal in death than in life!
The family was now ready to function like a well-oiled machine with every member assuming their part. They worked with a practiced efficiency. Dad quickly slit the throat of the cow. Warm, deep red blood rushed from the slit in the cow’s neck. He immediately took the hack saw and cut through and severed the head. One of the boys lifted the forty-five-pound head and laid it on a Sioux City Journal newspaper to the side. One of the boys slipped a five-gallon bucket under the headless carcass. Blood gushed into the bucket.
What little was left in all the cow’s four stomachs began to drain from the cow’s throat on to the granary floor. Steam rose from the warm carcass. The putrid smell of water and partially digested silage and kernels of corn made Dad and the boys instinctively turn away from the acrid smell for a moment. Regaining their composure, they quickly washed the floor with gallons of water.
Dad began by making a long knife cut down the underside of the hide from the anus to the base of the neck. The boys began to skin the animal from top to bottom, their sharp knives easily separating the hide from the carcass, like a warm knife cutting through butter. Their cuts to the hide and carcass were precise and practiced. Within minutes, the intact hide was freed from the carcass, like slipping off a warm coat in the middle of winter.
With a new blade in the meat saw, Dad sawed through the flesh and bones from the anus to the neck, this time cutting through the belly to the back. He pulled the rib cage open and began removing the internal organs. He knew care had to be taken not to contaminate the meat with the animal waste. He carefully cut out the intestines and lungs. He began removing the edible internal organs, the heart and the liver, while one of the boys removed the tongue from the head laying on the floor. Fat, edible organs, chunks of meat and intestines were placed in separate buckets.
With the hide and the internal organs and intestines removed and using a meat saw, Dad sawed the carcass down the middle, splitting it into two halves. He then cut off the front quarters, separating the front legs from the shoulders. The removal of each shoulder required three boys, two to hold on to the eighty-pound shoulder and one to cut the front leg free from the shoulder. Within minutes, two of the boys carried the first shoulder, and another boy carried two buckets of edible organs to the house.
The women heard the labored steps of the boys as they maneuvered the front quarter of the carcass down the narrow, steep stairs to the basement and placed it on the table. Mom and the girls were ready. The water was boiling, the jars were clean, the knives were sharpened, and their aprons tied neatly and tight around their waists.
Immediately, the women put the edible organs into boiling water. The larger cuts of meat were cut into smaller pieces and put into quart jars of water and spices, arranged at the end of the table. The smaller pieces of meat were placed into the throat of the hand meat grinder, turned by one of the younger girls. They cut off the layers of fat and put them into a bucket off to the side of the table. They cut off smaller chunks of meat, placed them in the hand-cranked meat grinder turned by the youngest girl and into the awaiting quart jars. When the jar was filled, Mom filled the jar with water and seasonings, leaving enough room for a smidgeon of fat on the top of the jar. One of the girls put a rubber seal around the mouth of the jar and pressed it on to the jar lid with a butter knife to seal it in place. She placed a metal Kerr cover over the mouth of the jar and tightened a metal lid over the cover, securing the rubber seal on the jar. The first jar was placed into the copper tub filled with boiling water on the kerosene stove.
After the second front quarter was finessed down the stairs and processed, three buckets of other internal organs arrived. The first bucket contained the intestines. Mom set about to wash out the intestines in preparation for stuffing them with ground beef for ring bologna. In the second bucket was the brain. The third and fourth buckets were stacked high with fat.
For the next three hours, a steady flow of fresh meat came from the corncrib butchery to the basement cannery. Mom bent over the floor drain as she cleaned and removed the linings of the intestine. She was the only one of the butchering crew willing to take on that distasteful task. They worked in concert together with happy chatter and laughter filling the air.
In the granary, Dad and the boys were cutting the rear quarters of the animal. The rear quarters were butchered like the front quarters except the weight of each was about 100 pounds. Soon the boys were carefully descending the bloodied, slippery steps with their heavy load.
The family had a use for each part of the animal. The heart would be boiled and sliced for bread. The kidneys and the liver would be ground up and put into sacks for liverwurst. The `tongue and heart would be boiled and cut into thin slices and served on bread for their lunches. The lining of the intestines would be cleaned, boiled and used for casings for the ring baloney. The brain would be made into head cheese. Any remaining fat on the bones was boiled off and used for hand soap, soup and lye soap. Large bones were boiled, releasing any meat remaining on the bones. They carefully put aside the large bones and laid them in a wicker basket. They knew that some members of their family treasured the bone marrow, sucking it out from the cracked open bones.
The buckets of fat had many uses. Some fat would be heated and made into lard. The lard would be a sumptuous addition to their pie crusts, cakes, cookies, breads and fet en stroop [6]. Other fat would be boiled leaving only schottchies [7], curiously shaped curls of rust brown cracklings. Flour and spices would then be added to the cracklings and ladled into eight by twelve-inch pans to be cooled and stored. Later, the thick, paste-like gray blob would be cut into half-inch slices, fried, and covered with butter and Aunt Jamima syrup. It was one of the family favorites for their morning breakfasts.
The boiled liver was put into the meat grinder. Lard, salt, pepper and spices were added and mixed together for liverwurst. Juices and fat oozed through the pores of the cleaned, flour sacks they had sewn into small bags earlier in the day.
By late afternoon, the butchering in the corncrib was finished. The heat of midday in the corncrib, and the hot humid air of the basement, had tired the entire butchering crew. The air was stifling. Sweat dripped from their faces soaking through their overfalls, shirts, blouses and aprons. They were quietly craving a moment when they could sit, rest and recover.
The granary floor was swashed clean. The knives were cleaned, and the 22-caliber rifle was put back on its rack in the hog house. The block and tackle was hung on the wall of the machine shed. But the canning was not yet complete.
Dad and the boys walked to the basement and began to help the women finish the canning. Together they collected the butcher knives, cleaned the tubs, tables and meat grinder and washed them in a nearby sink. The greasy and bloody floor and steps were mopped. They began to fill empty wooden peach boxes with packages of meat, wrapped in white waxed paper destined for the town locker.
Together they took the jars of canned meat out of the boiling copper tub, dried them off and gently put them in rows of shelves so as not to break their seals. They paused as they admired the 123 quarts of Mason jars of freshly butchered Iowa beef standing in formation like proud soldiers in parade dress.They looked with pride at all they accomplished on this late spring Iowa afternoon. Their smiles, chatter and laughter confirmed the relief they felt for a job well done.
They were exhausted but their work for the day was not yet done. There were cows to milk, calves to feed, climbing the silo and throwing down silage for the beef cattle, a coop full of chickens to feed, baby pigs and matronly sows to slop. The women still had potatoes to boil, garden vegetables to harvest and cook, all before their corncrib butchering day would come to an end.
But they were happy!
[1] A mangle was a machine that pressed towels, bed sheets and linens. It used the heat from two rollers, moving in contrasting motion to press the fabric flat without creases.
[2] Balkenbrij started with fat cracklings, then flour and spices were added. It was put into an 9x12 sized pan, cut into pieces, fried and served with butter and syrup.
[3] Loafing shed was a holding shed for cattle. Sometimes used to isolate sick or injured animals.
[4] Block and tackle was a system of two pulleys with a rope that threaded through the pulleys making it possible to leverage the lifting capacity.
[5] An emery wheel was a circular, foot pedal driven stone used for sharpening, grinding or polishing.
[6] Fet en Stroop – Fat and syrup. A family favorite. Bread slices were dipped in hot fat, put on the breakfast plate and smothered in syrup.
[7] Schottchies, a Dutch name for what remained after the fat was boiled off, leaving only cracklings.
CONTRIBUTORS: Dee Gorter, Clarence Gorter, Cleo Te Slaa, Arlen (Dutch Te Slaa), Freida Vander Sluis, Kathy McKinstry, Cathy Te Slaa, Caesar Orosco, web master, Josie Moore, editor
He had silently prayed a similar prayer on his way to the barn early that morning, thanking God for the rain and asking Him for guidance and family protection. Now, seated around the Formica topped kitchen table, surrounded by red and white vinyl and chrome chairs, the family was discussing what would happen, now that the rain had changed their plans for their normal house, field and garden work. Everyone knew that the normal work for the day would have to be postponed because of the rain-soaked fields.
But there were choices!
After spring rains had stopped, the family often went to the field to pull cockleburs and other weeds. The entire family would labor in the wet fields under the warming sun and humid air. If that was not possible, the boys would often hand pitch manure from the barn pens into a manure spreader using four or five tine pitchforks, loading the spreader one pitchfork at a time until it was heaping full of manure, only to have another empty manure spreader show up at the barn door, waiting to be filled. When not working in the field or garden, the women would cook the meals, bake bread and pies, patch overalls, wash and mangle clothes [1], clean out the storm cellar, wax the floors, pull garden weeds, clean eggs and a myriad of other household chores that kept them busy throughout the day.
The family sat silently considering the alternatives. All the rainy-day work alternatives had little appeal to them on any day, rain or shine!
Dad shifted in his chair and broke the silence. “I was at the town locker yesterday and I counted only sixteen packages of frozen beef in our locker. What do you think about butchering dry cow number 37? She’s been a poor milk producer now for a year and hasn’t given any milk for the last three months. I think she is already nine years old.” The boys nodded in agreement. Since all the cows wore a chain with a number around their necks, the boys knew exactly the cow he was talking about.
The family glanced around the table. They knew butchering was hard work and would take the time of the entire family the better part of the day. On the other hand, butchering, whether beef, pigs or chicken, held its own drama and fascination for them. It was different from their daily work and even had some enjoyable aspects to it.
Mom nodded her head enthusiastically in agreement. “Last week I checked and counted what we had in our cellar. We have only twenty-four quarts of beef, sixteen quarts of chicken and forty quarts of pork left. If we don’t get more butchering done soon, we may have to buy meat from the meat market.” Dad seemed a bit surprised by the rapidly diminishing stock of canned meat. “It seems like only last winter since we butchered that 600-pound heifer who was paralized from a slip on the ice. Do you remember we had to carry her to the granary with the front-end loader?” he said.
The oldest boy, who was the most experienced of the boys, reminded everyone, “You know that once we decide to butcher the cow, it will take the entire day. There will be all the preparation before hand, then the butchering, the processing and the cleanup. But, I think we can get this done today.”
Dad listened intently. He knew what his son was saying and wondered what other work they would have to put off until later if they began the butchering today. The family seemed relieved that the unpleasant task of walking the beanfield, pitching manure or house work might be put off to a later, drier day.
He agreed with his son about the time commitment. He also knew that the heavy rain of last evening would take the ground at least two days to dry before any field work could be done. He quietly reminded himself of the remaining stocks of beef, pork and chicken. He knew it would last them barely eight more weeks.
The family’s thoughts shifted in anticipation to the smells and mouth-watering tastes of newly dried beef on freshly baked bread, smothered with butter in their lunchboxes and daily meals for the next six months. Dad’s eyes widened with the thought of sucking the salty marrow out of the freshly butchered, boiled bones. Their mouths watered with the thought of freshly fried bacon, liverwurst and balkenbrij [2] for their morning breakfasts.
Their salivating thoughts won out in favor of beginning the butchering, and the family nodded their approval to begin the hard work of butchering. Even so, it would be a fun and special day,
“Ok, we’ll butcher today but we need to get moving. To butcher Cow #37, we can make the preparations this morning so we can begin butchering and canning after dinner this afternoon. At this point in the life of this cow there is only one use for her – the meat!”
The family pushed back their chairs from the table and waited for Mom to read the Bible. They listened quietly as she read from 2 Timothy 2: 1-13. Dad prayed asking God for guidance and protection in the coming afternoon. He knew from experience many things could go wrong with butchering.
With devotions over, the family began a final review for butchering. Every member of the family knew their part. Each had a job based on their strength and experience. They knew they had to work fast to keep the meat fresh and clean. They knew that butchering, whether beef, pork or chicken, was always challenging and fast paced, but in a strange way, fun and exciting.
The family began to realize the heavy, hot and tiring work ahead of them and what it meant to put their butchering plans into immediate action. The women knew they would need more help. Mom rang up her sister and asked the telephone operator to be transferred to Cynthia. Minutes later Aunt Cynthia agreed and said she would be at the farm within an hour.
There were 135 quart jars to be washed and sterilized. The thirty-gallon oval shaped copper tub had to be fetched from the basement storage, cleaned and filled with water and prepared for boiling. Zinc Kerr lids, rubber seals and white waxed butcher paper had to be bought from the Middleburg store, three miles away. The hand meat grinder had to be cleaned and attached to the basement table to grind the meat scraps for ground beef. The three-burner kerosene stove in the basement needed to be filled with three gallons of kerosene. They would have to wait until dinnertime to light the burners to bring the tub of water to a boil. The flour sacks and old bed sheets they had been saving for weeks had to be washed, cut and sewn into fourteen-inch-long bags, ready for stuffing with spices and ground liver for liverwurst and head cheese. Another table had to be set up just next to a floor drain to clean and sanitize the linings of the intestine, later to be filled with ground meat and spices for baloney. The sausage stuffer had to be cleaned and brought to the canning area and attached to a table. Glass and metal pans had to be cleaned for fat cracklings, flour and spices for balkenbrij. An additional locker in town had to be reserved for any part of the new butchering which could not be put into the quart jars.
While all this was going on in the house, the farmyard too bustled with activity. Dad and the boys went into the cattle yard and culled out Cow #37 and herded it to to the loafing shed [3].
They carefully removed all water, feed and straw bedding so the cow could not eat the straw. A large tarp was laid across the corncrib floor. The block and tackle [4] was now readied to hoist the carcass to the rafters. They checked the ropes and rafter to see if it could hold the 1100-pound cow. They checked the rafters for any damage. They attached a one- and one-half inch steel chain to the block and tackle and tied it to the middle of corn crib rafters.
Dad brought the 22-gauge rifle from the gun rack in the hog house and laid it in a corner of the corn crib. One of the boys laid a bullet next to the rifle. Another boy carried five-gallon buckets of water to the corncrib to flush the blood and waste off the concrete floor before and after butchering. The granary floor was one of the few places on the farm where the butchering of cattle and pigs could take place. It was relatively clean with a concrete floor but still had to be swept and flushed with buckets of water before butchering began.
Meanwhile, one of the boys sharpened the butcher knives on a pedal-driven emery wheel [5] in the machine shed. Other boys carried handfuls of apple tree limbs to the smokehouse in the grove to prepare the brisket and one of the shoulders for smoked, dried beef. A meat locker in town was reserved for any butchering their food cellar could not hold.
As noonday approached, they were ready. The house and yard preparations for butchering had taken the entire morning. The family sat down for dinner. One of the boys prayed. On the table, Mom placed a bowl of beef gravy and a heaping bowl of mashed potatoes, crowned with a large dollup of butter. The girls followed with a large bowl of canned beef swimming in meat juice. Other bowls of garden beans, canned sweet corn and a small bowl of canned beets followed.
The family was quiet throughout dinner. Their minds occupied with the work they were about to do.
With dinner over, the family moved to their ‘stations’. The boys boxed Cow #37 into a corner of the loafing shed. Dad slipped a rope around its neck and wound it back over its snout, creating a halter-like control of the cow. Their trek to the corncrib began.
The cow was unaccustomed to being led by anything and mightily resisted any movement. It seemed to know there was something different the family had in store for her. The cow would not budge. The cow’s legs stiffened as she weaved and bobbed, making slow progress from the loafing shed to the granary. She had never before been subjected to such restrictions on her freedom of movement. One of the boys raised the tail of the cow ninety degrees, forcing the cow to move ahead, a trick he had learned from Grandpa Henry.
One of the boys went out to the outhouse and tore pages out of the Montgomery Wards catalog. He walked into the grove to the smokehouse and lit a smouldering fire under a pile of apple tree branches.
Mom, the girls and Aunt Cynth went to the basement and lit the kerosene burners. They gave one last pass over the emery board to sharpen the knives, and prepared the buckets for the meat, fat and waste.
The boys began to assemble the block and tackle. Mom and the girls watched with interest from the porch of the house as they pushed the cow up a slight incline and into the center of the granary. The boys attached two ropes to its neck, and they pulled the rope tight from opposite sides to keep her head steady.
It was time for Dad to do one of the most difficult jobs as a farmer…killing one of his animals. Grandpa had been a skilled teacher to Dad in the art of farmyard butchering. He too had felt pangs of remorse for this part of the butchering process.
Reluctantly, Dad picked up the 22-caliber rifle laying on the floor of the granary and inserted a bullet into the chamber. The cow’s eyes were wild with fright. The boys held the ropes tight from both sides of the cow’s head, not allowing any movement of her head. He placed the rifle muzzle between the eyes of the cow and pulled the trigger. Immediately, the cow fell limp on the corncrib floor, but the eyes of the cow remained open, as if accusing Dad of the ultimate betrayal.
Dad turned aside and breathed a sigh of relief, slowly placing the rifle on the floor of the corn crib.
The boys quickly attached the block and tackle to the hind legs of the cow. The pully system of the block and tackle allowed them tremendous leverage. With one end tied to the hind legs of the cow and the other end tied to the joist of the granary, and inch by inch, they pulled up this half-ton-plus animal toward the rafters. The rafter creaked and groaned as the back hooves of the cows approached the rafter. When the hooves touched the granary joist, the cow now stretched twelve feet from the rafter to the concrete corncrib floor, with her snout only inches from the floor.
Stretched out, she seemed to be a much larger animal in death than in life!
The family was now ready to function like a well-oiled machine with every member assuming their part. They worked with a practiced efficiency. Dad quickly slit the throat of the cow. Warm, deep red blood rushed from the slit in the cow’s neck. He immediately took the hack saw and cut through and severed the head. One of the boys lifted the forty-five-pound head and laid it on a Sioux City Journal newspaper to the side. One of the boys slipped a five-gallon bucket under the headless carcass. Blood gushed into the bucket.
What little was left in all the cow’s four stomachs began to drain from the cow’s throat on to the granary floor. Steam rose from the warm carcass. The putrid smell of water and partially digested silage and kernels of corn made Dad and the boys instinctively turn away from the acrid smell for a moment. Regaining their composure, they quickly washed the floor with gallons of water.
Dad began by making a long knife cut down the underside of the hide from the anus to the base of the neck. The boys began to skin the animal from top to bottom, their sharp knives easily separating the hide from the carcass, like a warm knife cutting through butter. Their cuts to the hide and carcass were precise and practiced. Within minutes, the intact hide was freed from the carcass, like slipping off a warm coat in the middle of winter.
With a new blade in the meat saw, Dad sawed through the flesh and bones from the anus to the neck, this time cutting through the belly to the back. He pulled the rib cage open and began removing the internal organs. He knew care had to be taken not to contaminate the meat with the animal waste. He carefully cut out the intestines and lungs. He began removing the edible internal organs, the heart and the liver, while one of the boys removed the tongue from the head laying on the floor. Fat, edible organs, chunks of meat and intestines were placed in separate buckets.
With the hide and the internal organs and intestines removed and using a meat saw, Dad sawed the carcass down the middle, splitting it into two halves. He then cut off the front quarters, separating the front legs from the shoulders. The removal of each shoulder required three boys, two to hold on to the eighty-pound shoulder and one to cut the front leg free from the shoulder. Within minutes, two of the boys carried the first shoulder, and another boy carried two buckets of edible organs to the house.
The women heard the labored steps of the boys as they maneuvered the front quarter of the carcass down the narrow, steep stairs to the basement and placed it on the table. Mom and the girls were ready. The water was boiling, the jars were clean, the knives were sharpened, and their aprons tied neatly and tight around their waists.
Immediately, the women put the edible organs into boiling water. The larger cuts of meat were cut into smaller pieces and put into quart jars of water and spices, arranged at the end of the table. The smaller pieces of meat were placed into the throat of the hand meat grinder, turned by one of the younger girls. They cut off the layers of fat and put them into a bucket off to the side of the table. They cut off smaller chunks of meat, placed them in the hand-cranked meat grinder turned by the youngest girl and into the awaiting quart jars. When the jar was filled, Mom filled the jar with water and seasonings, leaving enough room for a smidgeon of fat on the top of the jar. One of the girls put a rubber seal around the mouth of the jar and pressed it on to the jar lid with a butter knife to seal it in place. She placed a metal Kerr cover over the mouth of the jar and tightened a metal lid over the cover, securing the rubber seal on the jar. The first jar was placed into the copper tub filled with boiling water on the kerosene stove.
After the second front quarter was finessed down the stairs and processed, three buckets of other internal organs arrived. The first bucket contained the intestines. Mom set about to wash out the intestines in preparation for stuffing them with ground beef for ring bologna. In the second bucket was the brain. The third and fourth buckets were stacked high with fat.
For the next three hours, a steady flow of fresh meat came from the corncrib butchery to the basement cannery. Mom bent over the floor drain as she cleaned and removed the linings of the intestine. She was the only one of the butchering crew willing to take on that distasteful task. They worked in concert together with happy chatter and laughter filling the air.
In the granary, Dad and the boys were cutting the rear quarters of the animal. The rear quarters were butchered like the front quarters except the weight of each was about 100 pounds. Soon the boys were carefully descending the bloodied, slippery steps with their heavy load.
The family had a use for each part of the animal. The heart would be boiled and sliced for bread. The kidneys and the liver would be ground up and put into sacks for liverwurst. The `tongue and heart would be boiled and cut into thin slices and served on bread for their lunches. The lining of the intestines would be cleaned, boiled and used for casings for the ring baloney. The brain would be made into head cheese. Any remaining fat on the bones was boiled off and used for hand soap, soup and lye soap. Large bones were boiled, releasing any meat remaining on the bones. They carefully put aside the large bones and laid them in a wicker basket. They knew that some members of their family treasured the bone marrow, sucking it out from the cracked open bones.
The buckets of fat had many uses. Some fat would be heated and made into lard. The lard would be a sumptuous addition to their pie crusts, cakes, cookies, breads and fet en stroop [6]. Other fat would be boiled leaving only schottchies [7], curiously shaped curls of rust brown cracklings. Flour and spices would then be added to the cracklings and ladled into eight by twelve-inch pans to be cooled and stored. Later, the thick, paste-like gray blob would be cut into half-inch slices, fried, and covered with butter and Aunt Jamima syrup. It was one of the family favorites for their morning breakfasts.
The boiled liver was put into the meat grinder. Lard, salt, pepper and spices were added and mixed together for liverwurst. Juices and fat oozed through the pores of the cleaned, flour sacks they had sewn into small bags earlier in the day.
By late afternoon, the butchering in the corncrib was finished. The heat of midday in the corncrib, and the hot humid air of the basement, had tired the entire butchering crew. The air was stifling. Sweat dripped from their faces soaking through their overfalls, shirts, blouses and aprons. They were quietly craving a moment when they could sit, rest and recover.
The granary floor was swashed clean. The knives were cleaned, and the 22-caliber rifle was put back on its rack in the hog house. The block and tackle was hung on the wall of the machine shed. But the canning was not yet complete.
Dad and the boys walked to the basement and began to help the women finish the canning. Together they collected the butcher knives, cleaned the tubs, tables and meat grinder and washed them in a nearby sink. The greasy and bloody floor and steps were mopped. They began to fill empty wooden peach boxes with packages of meat, wrapped in white waxed paper destined for the town locker.
Together they took the jars of canned meat out of the boiling copper tub, dried them off and gently put them in rows of shelves so as not to break their seals. They paused as they admired the 123 quarts of Mason jars of freshly butchered Iowa beef standing in formation like proud soldiers in parade dress.They looked with pride at all they accomplished on this late spring Iowa afternoon. Their smiles, chatter and laughter confirmed the relief they felt for a job well done.
They were exhausted but their work for the day was not yet done. There were cows to milk, calves to feed, climbing the silo and throwing down silage for the beef cattle, a coop full of chickens to feed, baby pigs and matronly sows to slop. The women still had potatoes to boil, garden vegetables to harvest and cook, all before their corncrib butchering day would come to an end.
But they were happy!
[1] A mangle was a machine that pressed towels, bed sheets and linens. It used the heat from two rollers, moving in contrasting motion to press the fabric flat without creases.
[2] Balkenbrij started with fat cracklings, then flour and spices were added. It was put into an 9x12 sized pan, cut into pieces, fried and served with butter and syrup.
[3] Loafing shed was a holding shed for cattle. Sometimes used to isolate sick or injured animals.
[4] Block and tackle was a system of two pulleys with a rope that threaded through the pulleys making it possible to leverage the lifting capacity.
[5] An emery wheel was a circular, foot pedal driven stone used for sharpening, grinding or polishing.
[6] Fet en Stroop – Fat and syrup. A family favorite. Bread slices were dipped in hot fat, put on the breakfast plate and smothered in syrup.
[7] Schottchies, a Dutch name for what remained after the fat was boiled off, leaving only cracklings.
CONTRIBUTORS: Dee Gorter, Clarence Gorter, Cleo Te Slaa, Arlen (Dutch Te Slaa), Freida Vander Sluis, Kathy McKinstry, Cathy Te Slaa, Caesar Orosco, web master, Josie Moore, editor
1. The Bright Red and Blue Mobile Grocery Store
It was Friday afternoon during a hot dry July in a far corner of Northwest Iowa. It was not unusual for a mid-summer day in 1952 for the farmstead to be so parched and stifling with temperatures reaching into the high nineties.
The family was waiting for a visitor - one special visitor! Throughout the week, many visitors showed up at the farm, all unexpected but regular visitors. There were visits from neighbors, friends, and relatives. Others came to the farm to work. There was Chris, the corn sheller, and Mr. Grevengood, the ear corn grinder and the rendering truck driver. There were cattle buyers and sellers, who a day or two later would be followed by the drivers of strait trucks and semi-trucks, hauling livestock to and from the farm. Less frequently but no less important was the preacher from the Middleburg Free Grace Reformed Church coming to check on the health of their souls.
Many salesmen came to the farm since to save the farmers the many miles of travel it would take for them to come to the salesmen. There were salesmen such as the Watkins man, who sold bottles of vitamins and varieties of elixirs; the Raleigh man, who championed the gastronomical benefits of castor oil and cod liver oil (Mom always seemed to be low on both); the Fuller brush salesman, who came by every few months selling what he said were the best, longest-lasting brushes the world had ever known; and feed and supplement salesmen too. One of the family’s favorite feed salesmen was the handsome and curly-haired Ray Van Pelt, who ventured all the way from the distant nine-mile-away town of Orange City to sell his protein bags of Moorman’s Calf Manna.
But, by far, the weekly family favorite was the Friday visitor who was about to arrive. The kids and mom were waiting for him on the porch of the house. That special visitor had come to their farm weekly for years. They knew that, for a short while this afternoon, he would make their day full of sweets, fun and laughter.
That special guest was Mr. Hank Brinks.
Mr. Brinks owned and operated, along with one helper, a grocery store and mobile peddle wagon[1] from a one-room, wooden 1920s building situated in the village of Middleburg. The fifty-two-person town was named after a place in the Netherlands, as it was located almost an equal distance of seven or eight miles from several larger Dutch settlements including Hull, Orange City, Sioux Center and Boyden.
For most farm families in the 1950s, the three- or four-mile trip from their farms to the Middleburg grocery store was a significant distance and a cost of time and money. Mr. Brinks knew that busy farm families had little time to travel to his Middleburg store, so years before he decided to meet those families on their farms. Mr. Brinks had several routes with his peddle wagon, and Friday afternoon was his stop at Mom and Dad’s farm. It was a joy for him to visit the farms of his friends and neighbors, and his patrons returned the joy.
Mom and the kids knew that Mr. Brinks would soon be coming over the hill near the Vander Wilt farm, nearly a mile down the gravel road to the south. They would be his next stop. His weekly summer visits were as predictable as the church bells ringing on 9:30 Sunday mornings to mark the beginning of Free Grace Reformed Church worship services. Now it was only minutes before they would see his brightly painted, fire-engine-red, and deep-ocean-blue, mobile grocery store come into view.
And then, right on time, it appeared!
The colorful relic lumbered painfully slow as it inched its way to their farm. Gravity gave help to this little peddle wagon as it picked up speed coming down the hill. Mr. Brink’s peddle wagon was powered by a Model A, four-cylinder Ford engine. He, or someone before him, had attached to these four skinny tires, a painted blue frame. Hanging on for dear life to this frame was a collection of red painted boxes and bays of odd sizes and shapes, popping out here and there from its strung-together body. Somehow, this blue contraption with its attendant red cubicles, moved in a miraculously discordant unity.
The minutes went by slowly for the waiting kids. Finally, the peddle wagon passed over the wooden bridge of the West Branch Creek, only a pasture’s length away from their driveway. By the time Mr. Brinks had made his slow turn into the farm’s newly leveled, gravel driveway, the kids and Mom were all waiting at the end of the sidewalk.
Excitement rushed over the kids as the treat wagon slowly came to stop at the end of the sidewalk. It was at that moment when the five pennies in their pockets, given to each of them for their weekly allowance, began to jingle in their pockets. Their fingers pinched the pennies checking to see if they were still there.
Mr. Brinks turned off the engine and smiled at them from behind the steering wheel. They returned his smile with laughs, waves of greeting and smiles of their own. Mr. Brinks was a kind, patient man.
Mr. Brinks slowly stepped out of his peddle wagon. He sauntered to the waiting assembly. His walk reminded the kids of the story of a sloth that their teacher, Mrs. Bomgaars had told them. The older kids smiled knowingly at each other.
He greeted each of the kids by name in his easy-going speech. His affection for them was obvious. His eyes showered kindness over them as they crowded around him. His quick smile and the sparkle in his eyes were genuine, and they were memorable.
Memorable, because it took some time for his smile to travel to the far corners of his mouth. His smile seemed to open his droopy eyes and creases in deep horizontal lines appeared on his forehead.
His broad smile also revealed a man who seldom, if ever, had visited a dentist. His eye teeth were missing on his upper jaw, there were some empty spaces between teeth on his lower jaw. The older kids had heard a neighbor talk about smiles like Mr. Brinks’ as “summer teeth” – som-er here and som-er there! It never occurred to them that his tooth-missing smile, slow gait, and the peculiar tilt to his body was in any way different from most of their family, friends, neighbors, and fellow church members. Most of them also had some form of modified facial appearance, characteristic body limp, or leaning acquired from one of their many life challenges.
Mr. Brinks approached the family with a modest nod and greeting to Mom. He surveyed the family with slow, eye-to-eye recognition of each child, smiling broadly to them and addressing each of them by their first names in a breathy, soft-spoken slow drawl. Their returning smiles mirrored their admiration for him. The children, barely able to contain their excitement, waited patiently for Mr. Brinks to finish his greetings while secretly thinking, Let’s get over the hi’s and hellos, Mr. Brinks, and get on with buying our treats!
Mr. Brinks moved to the driver’s side of his mobile store. For perhaps the umpteenth time that day, he began to place large metal support rods into metal pockets of the peddle wagon to hold up the wooden sides. The now-opened peddle wagon revealed cubbies, compartments, doors, drawers, and boxes, some of them were held with a latch and a fastener. Others were drawers that opened with brass pulls and white porcelain knobs, some were held in place with a clasp and a pin attached to a chain, while still others were like tables that dropped down and held in place with flimsy chains.
Every section he opened was like celebrating Christmas Eve in the middle of a hot July day. As he opened his Pandora’s wagon of treats, he continued his casual conversation with the kids. Finally, all the doors and drawers, cubbies, compartments, and tables were opened.
Mr. Brinks declared he was ready for business.
The kids clamored around the peddle wagon, trying to get a better look. The drop-down tables were higher-than-eyeball view for the kids. They could see the myriad colors and shapes of their sweet choices. There were foot-long braids of red and black licorice. In other drawers there were white
and pink unwrapped peppermints, selling for fifteen cents for thirty peppermints. In the next drawer were small packs of Black Jack and Juicy Fruit gum.
In another drawer were small metal containers with “Sin-Sin” inside. The kids called the contents Sin-Sin because they only tasted them when sitting sleepily on hard church pews. Mom knew them as Sen-Sen, a candy with a lofty purpose, -- to stay awake in church! The kids knew about “sin” but not” sen”. For years they had incorrectly heard Dad and Mom to refer to them as “Sin-Sin”. They had no idea what ‘Sen-Sen’ was! So, the bitter, distasteful bad breath treatment of ‘Sen-Sen’ persisted as “Sin-Sin” in their minds.
The kids’ favorite was the soft, gooey goodness of the pink bubble gum: They knew what would happen if they chewed just a single chunk of gum: bubbles would grow so large that they would cover their faces, popping in a muffled poof, leaving bubble gum stuck to their mouths, chins, and noses. The kids also knew what would happen if they packed two of the gummy wads into their mouths. It would pop with an even softer “poof,” but the bubble would settle slowly, covering their faces from their chins to their foreheads and cheek to cheek. They knew the feat of blowing the biggest bubble with a double bubble gum would give them bragging rights and garner the admiration of the other kids.
But there also was a bonus to the pink, one-cent bubble gum: it came wrapped in waxed paper, on which was printed a six-panel, folded, comic strip…in color!! Some of the six-paneled stories were short stories of heroes overcoming tremendous odds, all told within those six panels. Others were stories of cartoon character’s humorous exploits that drew smiles and ‘ahs’ as the kids passed the stories around. It didn’t matter whether the kids could read them or not. The older siblings, Mom or Dad, would read the stories aloud as the kids followed along with the pictures.
Another of their favorite treats was jawbreakers. They came in every color imaginable, but each color seemed new and exotic to the youngest kids. There were so many colors that their country schoolteacher had not yet taught the youngest of the children the color names. The smaller jaw breakers sold for one penny each. The giant jaw breakers, nearly twice the size of the smaller ones, sold for two pennies each.
The giant jaw breakers were held in high esteem with the kids. They were so big that they could last for hours inside their cheeks. There were squeals of laughter as they tried to talk with the giant spheres in their mouths. There was no way they could be understood. It was gibberish. The kids found ways to overcome this babbled speech among the gaggled group. They could tuck the jaw breaker into one of their cheeks, giving the appearance of having a major toothache. Or, they could hold the sticky confection in their hands and continue to negotiate for additional treats in an understandable language.
By popping the jaw breakers in and out of their mouths, their sweet goodness could melt down for hours, until only a BB-sized-center remained, and with a strong bite of their grown-up teeth, crush it into sweet oblivion. The kids had another way of extending the life of jaw breakers and gum: storing them overnight on the top of the bedpost or on a nearby windowsill, the gum waiting to be softened and re-chewed again for another four or five days of enjoyment.
Two of the boys decided to combine their allowance and buy a package of candied Lucky Strikes. They were a bit smaller than the real cigarettes that the grown-ups smoked, but they did have a red colored tip, simulating a real-McCoy. It was fun to hang a cigarette from their loosely pursed lips and imitate some of the older boys smoking the real cigarettes. They figured for today they could afford to spend half of their allowance for a pack of candy cigarettes. Besides, they might be able to sell two of them for a penny.
While the children were making their precious .05-cent weekly allowance buying decisions, Mom went about doing her weekly shopping with Mr. Brinks. The two grownups walked around the back of the peddle wagon. Mr. Brinks already knew what Mom was going to order, as it was the same order she had made every week for many months.
On the back hung an additional box, not much larger than a trans-Atlantic steamer trunk. It was the ice box. Among the blocks of ice were processed meats such as red-dyed ring bologna, small packages of liverwurst, sliced salami, and more. Store-bought meat was the first item she examined as the squeaky hinges of the ice box were lifted. Processed meat was a special treat for a family normally accustomed to eating butchered and colorless home-canned meats for their daily meals and lunch pails. But Mr. Brink’s ring bologna was colorful, salty, perfectly formed, and tied up into an oval shape, with both ends held together with a waxed string.
On the opposite side of the wagon Mr. Brinks carried his bread and cereals. The bread loaves were wrapped in white plastic, printed with different-sized balloons of many colors. They came to know it as Wonder Bread. It was rare that Mom would indulge in any of the store-bought bread baked outside her own farm kitchen. She reminded herself that it was only last Saturday that she and the girls had baked six loaves of bread. She knew her family would object to her buying Wonder Bread. Her home-baked fresh bread, with buttery crusts and big holes in the slices, was one of their favorite foods. Everyone looked forward to smelling the freshly baked bread in their greased rectangular pans, with breadcrusts spilling over the sides of the pan. Wonder Bread had no such smell. It looked and tasted sterile. It had no air pockets of their sliced homemade bread. No, there was no need for store-bought bread.
The cereals were different and regularly caught her eye. She was accustomed to purchasing large, round cardboard containers of Quaker Oats oatmeal with a picture of a pilgrim on the side. One such container purchase would usually last two weeks of breakfasts and baking.
But there were newer cereals of interest to Mom. One was a newer General Mills cereal called Cheerios. Their taste, shape, and crunchiness were quite different from the eggs, meat, bread, balkonbrei, leberwurst, fet, and strop of their typical breakfast. Mr. Brinks could count on Mom to buy at least two boxes of dried cereal every week. But she recently had second thoughts about purchasing these cereals. Last month, one of the boys had poured out the Cheerios into his breakfast bowl only to find maggots writhing about in the milk and Cheerios.
Now with the shopping nearly done, it was time for Mom to barter with Mr. Brinks. Mom had set aside cartons of four dozen fresh, cleaned farm eggs on the sidewalk. She asked Mr. Brinks if she could exchange them for two rings of bologna, a small box of brown sugar, and a box of corn flakes. Mr. Brinks smiled with his approval. He was certain he could re-barter or sell them to other farmers or Middeburgans who needed eggs. It was only a matter of seconds before they both agreed to the exchange.
Finally, each kid made their buying decisions. They paid Mr. Brinks for their treats with their five-penny weekly allowance and celebrated their purchases. Mom looked at the kids with pride. They had learned a valuable lesson in making their own decisions. She then settled up with Mr. Brinks.
The kids barely noticed Mr. Brinks as he began to close the doors, drawers, and boxes of his bright-red- and-blue-peddle wagon. Their chatter and happiness were in full bloom. They laughed at each other with their jaw-breaker impeded-speech. Their eyes were wide with amazement as the pink double bubble gums popped, covering their faces. They guffawed as the oldest boy read the bubble gum stories to them.
Mr. Brinks surveyed this happy scene, then stepped on the running board of the jalopy and slid behind the steering wheel. He gave Mom a modest goodbye wave and turned the starter of his Model A, making the motor sputter to a wheezing start. Startled by the labored start of the motor, the kids’ attention suddenly turned to Mr. Brinks. He smiled at them, and they returned his smile with waves and enthusiastic goodbyes.
Suddenly, it was over as quickly as it had begun. Mr. Brinks was off to his next neighborhood customer, trailed by a small cloud of farm road dust.
The family had just experienced one of their favorite weekly visitors to their farm. Already, the kids knew Mr. Brinks would return next week, bringing with him store-bought groceries, colorful sweets, and fun! Even now, they could imagine Mr. Brinks coming down the Vander Wilt hill and turning into their driveway in his bright red-and-blue mobile grocery store.
They could hardly wait!!
[1] Peddle wagons were rather common in the 1920’s to 1950’s. It was so named because merchants travelled the countryside, selling their goods from a wagon. The body of the peddle wagon could be almost anything if it was powered by some sort of a motor. The peddle wagon depicted is a precedent of peddle wagons 15 years prior to Mr. Brink's wagon.
CONTRIBUTORS: Cleo Te Slaa, Dee Gorter, Clarence Gorter, Mitchel and Emily Punt, Arlene Schovald, Vicki Trautman, Pat Haverman, Cathy Te Slaa, Proofreader, Josephine Moore, Editor. Caesar Orosco, Web Master
The family was waiting for a visitor - one special visitor! Throughout the week, many visitors showed up at the farm, all unexpected but regular visitors. There were visits from neighbors, friends, and relatives. Others came to the farm to work. There was Chris, the corn sheller, and Mr. Grevengood, the ear corn grinder and the rendering truck driver. There were cattle buyers and sellers, who a day or two later would be followed by the drivers of strait trucks and semi-trucks, hauling livestock to and from the farm. Less frequently but no less important was the preacher from the Middleburg Free Grace Reformed Church coming to check on the health of their souls.
Many salesmen came to the farm since to save the farmers the many miles of travel it would take for them to come to the salesmen. There were salesmen such as the Watkins man, who sold bottles of vitamins and varieties of elixirs; the Raleigh man, who championed the gastronomical benefits of castor oil and cod liver oil (Mom always seemed to be low on both); the Fuller brush salesman, who came by every few months selling what he said were the best, longest-lasting brushes the world had ever known; and feed and supplement salesmen too. One of the family’s favorite feed salesmen was the handsome and curly-haired Ray Van Pelt, who ventured all the way from the distant nine-mile-away town of Orange City to sell his protein bags of Moorman’s Calf Manna.
But, by far, the weekly family favorite was the Friday visitor who was about to arrive. The kids and mom were waiting for him on the porch of the house. That special visitor had come to their farm weekly for years. They knew that, for a short while this afternoon, he would make their day full of sweets, fun and laughter.
That special guest was Mr. Hank Brinks.
Mr. Brinks owned and operated, along with one helper, a grocery store and mobile peddle wagon[1] from a one-room, wooden 1920s building situated in the village of Middleburg. The fifty-two-person town was named after a place in the Netherlands, as it was located almost an equal distance of seven or eight miles from several larger Dutch settlements including Hull, Orange City, Sioux Center and Boyden.
For most farm families in the 1950s, the three- or four-mile trip from their farms to the Middleburg grocery store was a significant distance and a cost of time and money. Mr. Brinks knew that busy farm families had little time to travel to his Middleburg store, so years before he decided to meet those families on their farms. Mr. Brinks had several routes with his peddle wagon, and Friday afternoon was his stop at Mom and Dad’s farm. It was a joy for him to visit the farms of his friends and neighbors, and his patrons returned the joy.
Mom and the kids knew that Mr. Brinks would soon be coming over the hill near the Vander Wilt farm, nearly a mile down the gravel road to the south. They would be his next stop. His weekly summer visits were as predictable as the church bells ringing on 9:30 Sunday mornings to mark the beginning of Free Grace Reformed Church worship services. Now it was only minutes before they would see his brightly painted, fire-engine-red, and deep-ocean-blue, mobile grocery store come into view.
And then, right on time, it appeared!
The colorful relic lumbered painfully slow as it inched its way to their farm. Gravity gave help to this little peddle wagon as it picked up speed coming down the hill. Mr. Brink’s peddle wagon was powered by a Model A, four-cylinder Ford engine. He, or someone before him, had attached to these four skinny tires, a painted blue frame. Hanging on for dear life to this frame was a collection of red painted boxes and bays of odd sizes and shapes, popping out here and there from its strung-together body. Somehow, this blue contraption with its attendant red cubicles, moved in a miraculously discordant unity.
The minutes went by slowly for the waiting kids. Finally, the peddle wagon passed over the wooden bridge of the West Branch Creek, only a pasture’s length away from their driveway. By the time Mr. Brinks had made his slow turn into the farm’s newly leveled, gravel driveway, the kids and Mom were all waiting at the end of the sidewalk.
Excitement rushed over the kids as the treat wagon slowly came to stop at the end of the sidewalk. It was at that moment when the five pennies in their pockets, given to each of them for their weekly allowance, began to jingle in their pockets. Their fingers pinched the pennies checking to see if they were still there.
Mr. Brinks turned off the engine and smiled at them from behind the steering wheel. They returned his smile with laughs, waves of greeting and smiles of their own. Mr. Brinks was a kind, patient man.
Mr. Brinks slowly stepped out of his peddle wagon. He sauntered to the waiting assembly. His walk reminded the kids of the story of a sloth that their teacher, Mrs. Bomgaars had told them. The older kids smiled knowingly at each other.
He greeted each of the kids by name in his easy-going speech. His affection for them was obvious. His eyes showered kindness over them as they crowded around him. His quick smile and the sparkle in his eyes were genuine, and they were memorable.
Memorable, because it took some time for his smile to travel to the far corners of his mouth. His smile seemed to open his droopy eyes and creases in deep horizontal lines appeared on his forehead.
His broad smile also revealed a man who seldom, if ever, had visited a dentist. His eye teeth were missing on his upper jaw, there were some empty spaces between teeth on his lower jaw. The older kids had heard a neighbor talk about smiles like Mr. Brinks’ as “summer teeth” – som-er here and som-er there! It never occurred to them that his tooth-missing smile, slow gait, and the peculiar tilt to his body was in any way different from most of their family, friends, neighbors, and fellow church members. Most of them also had some form of modified facial appearance, characteristic body limp, or leaning acquired from one of their many life challenges.
Mr. Brinks approached the family with a modest nod and greeting to Mom. He surveyed the family with slow, eye-to-eye recognition of each child, smiling broadly to them and addressing each of them by their first names in a breathy, soft-spoken slow drawl. Their returning smiles mirrored their admiration for him. The children, barely able to contain their excitement, waited patiently for Mr. Brinks to finish his greetings while secretly thinking, Let’s get over the hi’s and hellos, Mr. Brinks, and get on with buying our treats!
Mr. Brinks moved to the driver’s side of his mobile store. For perhaps the umpteenth time that day, he began to place large metal support rods into metal pockets of the peddle wagon to hold up the wooden sides. The now-opened peddle wagon revealed cubbies, compartments, doors, drawers, and boxes, some of them were held with a latch and a fastener. Others were drawers that opened with brass pulls and white porcelain knobs, some were held in place with a clasp and a pin attached to a chain, while still others were like tables that dropped down and held in place with flimsy chains.
Every section he opened was like celebrating Christmas Eve in the middle of a hot July day. As he opened his Pandora’s wagon of treats, he continued his casual conversation with the kids. Finally, all the doors and drawers, cubbies, compartments, and tables were opened.
Mr. Brinks declared he was ready for business.
The kids clamored around the peddle wagon, trying to get a better look. The drop-down tables were higher-than-eyeball view for the kids. They could see the myriad colors and shapes of their sweet choices. There were foot-long braids of red and black licorice. In other drawers there were white
and pink unwrapped peppermints, selling for fifteen cents for thirty peppermints. In the next drawer were small packs of Black Jack and Juicy Fruit gum.
In another drawer were small metal containers with “Sin-Sin” inside. The kids called the contents Sin-Sin because they only tasted them when sitting sleepily on hard church pews. Mom knew them as Sen-Sen, a candy with a lofty purpose, -- to stay awake in church! The kids knew about “sin” but not” sen”. For years they had incorrectly heard Dad and Mom to refer to them as “Sin-Sin”. They had no idea what ‘Sen-Sen’ was! So, the bitter, distasteful bad breath treatment of ‘Sen-Sen’ persisted as “Sin-Sin” in their minds.
The kids’ favorite was the soft, gooey goodness of the pink bubble gum: They knew what would happen if they chewed just a single chunk of gum: bubbles would grow so large that they would cover their faces, popping in a muffled poof, leaving bubble gum stuck to their mouths, chins, and noses. The kids also knew what would happen if they packed two of the gummy wads into their mouths. It would pop with an even softer “poof,” but the bubble would settle slowly, covering their faces from their chins to their foreheads and cheek to cheek. They knew the feat of blowing the biggest bubble with a double bubble gum would give them bragging rights and garner the admiration of the other kids.
But there also was a bonus to the pink, one-cent bubble gum: it came wrapped in waxed paper, on which was printed a six-panel, folded, comic strip…in color!! Some of the six-paneled stories were short stories of heroes overcoming tremendous odds, all told within those six panels. Others were stories of cartoon character’s humorous exploits that drew smiles and ‘ahs’ as the kids passed the stories around. It didn’t matter whether the kids could read them or not. The older siblings, Mom or Dad, would read the stories aloud as the kids followed along with the pictures.
Another of their favorite treats was jawbreakers. They came in every color imaginable, but each color seemed new and exotic to the youngest kids. There were so many colors that their country schoolteacher had not yet taught the youngest of the children the color names. The smaller jaw breakers sold for one penny each. The giant jaw breakers, nearly twice the size of the smaller ones, sold for two pennies each.
The giant jaw breakers were held in high esteem with the kids. They were so big that they could last for hours inside their cheeks. There were squeals of laughter as they tried to talk with the giant spheres in their mouths. There was no way they could be understood. It was gibberish. The kids found ways to overcome this babbled speech among the gaggled group. They could tuck the jaw breaker into one of their cheeks, giving the appearance of having a major toothache. Or, they could hold the sticky confection in their hands and continue to negotiate for additional treats in an understandable language.
By popping the jaw breakers in and out of their mouths, their sweet goodness could melt down for hours, until only a BB-sized-center remained, and with a strong bite of their grown-up teeth, crush it into sweet oblivion. The kids had another way of extending the life of jaw breakers and gum: storing them overnight on the top of the bedpost or on a nearby windowsill, the gum waiting to be softened and re-chewed again for another four or five days of enjoyment.
Two of the boys decided to combine their allowance and buy a package of candied Lucky Strikes. They were a bit smaller than the real cigarettes that the grown-ups smoked, but they did have a red colored tip, simulating a real-McCoy. It was fun to hang a cigarette from their loosely pursed lips and imitate some of the older boys smoking the real cigarettes. They figured for today they could afford to spend half of their allowance for a pack of candy cigarettes. Besides, they might be able to sell two of them for a penny.
While the children were making their precious .05-cent weekly allowance buying decisions, Mom went about doing her weekly shopping with Mr. Brinks. The two grownups walked around the back of the peddle wagon. Mr. Brinks already knew what Mom was going to order, as it was the same order she had made every week for many months.
On the back hung an additional box, not much larger than a trans-Atlantic steamer trunk. It was the ice box. Among the blocks of ice were processed meats such as red-dyed ring bologna, small packages of liverwurst, sliced salami, and more. Store-bought meat was the first item she examined as the squeaky hinges of the ice box were lifted. Processed meat was a special treat for a family normally accustomed to eating butchered and colorless home-canned meats for their daily meals and lunch pails. But Mr. Brink’s ring bologna was colorful, salty, perfectly formed, and tied up into an oval shape, with both ends held together with a waxed string.
On the opposite side of the wagon Mr. Brinks carried his bread and cereals. The bread loaves were wrapped in white plastic, printed with different-sized balloons of many colors. They came to know it as Wonder Bread. It was rare that Mom would indulge in any of the store-bought bread baked outside her own farm kitchen. She reminded herself that it was only last Saturday that she and the girls had baked six loaves of bread. She knew her family would object to her buying Wonder Bread. Her home-baked fresh bread, with buttery crusts and big holes in the slices, was one of their favorite foods. Everyone looked forward to smelling the freshly baked bread in their greased rectangular pans, with breadcrusts spilling over the sides of the pan. Wonder Bread had no such smell. It looked and tasted sterile. It had no air pockets of their sliced homemade bread. No, there was no need for store-bought bread.
The cereals were different and regularly caught her eye. She was accustomed to purchasing large, round cardboard containers of Quaker Oats oatmeal with a picture of a pilgrim on the side. One such container purchase would usually last two weeks of breakfasts and baking.
But there were newer cereals of interest to Mom. One was a newer General Mills cereal called Cheerios. Their taste, shape, and crunchiness were quite different from the eggs, meat, bread, balkonbrei, leberwurst, fet, and strop of their typical breakfast. Mr. Brinks could count on Mom to buy at least two boxes of dried cereal every week. But she recently had second thoughts about purchasing these cereals. Last month, one of the boys had poured out the Cheerios into his breakfast bowl only to find maggots writhing about in the milk and Cheerios.
Now with the shopping nearly done, it was time for Mom to barter with Mr. Brinks. Mom had set aside cartons of four dozen fresh, cleaned farm eggs on the sidewalk. She asked Mr. Brinks if she could exchange them for two rings of bologna, a small box of brown sugar, and a box of corn flakes. Mr. Brinks smiled with his approval. He was certain he could re-barter or sell them to other farmers or Middeburgans who needed eggs. It was only a matter of seconds before they both agreed to the exchange.
Finally, each kid made their buying decisions. They paid Mr. Brinks for their treats with their five-penny weekly allowance and celebrated their purchases. Mom looked at the kids with pride. They had learned a valuable lesson in making their own decisions. She then settled up with Mr. Brinks.
The kids barely noticed Mr. Brinks as he began to close the doors, drawers, and boxes of his bright-red- and-blue-peddle wagon. Their chatter and happiness were in full bloom. They laughed at each other with their jaw-breaker impeded-speech. Their eyes were wide with amazement as the pink double bubble gums popped, covering their faces. They guffawed as the oldest boy read the bubble gum stories to them.
Mr. Brinks surveyed this happy scene, then stepped on the running board of the jalopy and slid behind the steering wheel. He gave Mom a modest goodbye wave and turned the starter of his Model A, making the motor sputter to a wheezing start. Startled by the labored start of the motor, the kids’ attention suddenly turned to Mr. Brinks. He smiled at them, and they returned his smile with waves and enthusiastic goodbyes.
Suddenly, it was over as quickly as it had begun. Mr. Brinks was off to his next neighborhood customer, trailed by a small cloud of farm road dust.
The family had just experienced one of their favorite weekly visitors to their farm. Already, the kids knew Mr. Brinks would return next week, bringing with him store-bought groceries, colorful sweets, and fun! Even now, they could imagine Mr. Brinks coming down the Vander Wilt hill and turning into their driveway in his bright red-and-blue mobile grocery store.
They could hardly wait!!
[1] Peddle wagons were rather common in the 1920’s to 1950’s. It was so named because merchants travelled the countryside, selling their goods from a wagon. The body of the peddle wagon could be almost anything if it was powered by some sort of a motor. The peddle wagon depicted is a precedent of peddle wagons 15 years prior to Mr. Brink's wagon.
CONTRIBUTORS: Cleo Te Slaa, Dee Gorter, Clarence Gorter, Mitchel and Emily Punt, Arlene Schovald, Vicki Trautman, Pat Haverman, Cathy Te Slaa, Proofreader, Josephine Moore, Editor. Caesar Orosco, Web Master