Blogging My Autobiography - Chapter 6

We have a couple of high schools in our area who have interesting nicknames for their teams. Most schools are Eagles, Tigers, Titans or Vikings or similar. All either predators or some type of warrior. However, there are two here who are Farmers and Beet-diggers. Go Diggers! These could easily be the name of a high school in my families small town. It’s still so small that they don’t have a high school of their own. I kinda hope it stays that way. Rural with working farms that might grow a few sugar beets.

Beet sugar was a big business in the late 1800s and early 1900s here. It was the only way to get sugar. We have a big lake here, but sugar cane needs more moisture than even the Canal can provide, so sugar beets it is. Why all the talk about sugar beets? Well, it was a favorite thing of mine in the fall. You would walk a field after it had been harvested and pick up a beet, flick open your pocket knife (I have always carried one, another farmer thing) and cut out the sweet center. You could chew it as you walked along, crunchy sweet, until all the sugar was gone and then spit the left over fiber. That became another game, who could spit the longest distance. I usually lost. Never was a very good spitter. Too much saliva and didn’t get a good enough seal to create the pressure required. Some folks made it into an art form and could spit long distances. I envied them.

It seemed that I rarely rode in a car when I went up to visit my relatives. I walked everywhere. Still like walking and walking fast. I would walk up to my Uncle Delbert’s store for a few groceries for my grandmother some times. That was a good thing, Delbert had a huge rack of penny candy and I usually could finagle a penny or two out of Grandma Grace for a stick of licorice or bubble gum. I do want to mention the licorice sticks. I thought they were cool, about the length of a small cigar with a stamp in them that flattened out the tube about a third of the way down. S&H, that’s what was stamped there. It added to the allure. Double Bubble chewing gum or sometimes Beemans (licorice again) or Clove gum. Double Bubble was nice because it had a mini comic book inside.

Other walks included hunting asparagus in the ditches that ran everywhere or walking up the road to Uncle Frank’s dairy for a couple of quarts of milk. This was real milk, fresh with cream on the top, right out of the cow bottled in a Mason jar. Sometimes still warm. I did learn how to hand milk a cow, but mostly it was done by the pumps you see today. hard to milk 200 head twice a day by hand. My Uncle Frank was a real interesting fellow. He laughed a lot and was mischievous like some of the men in my grandfather’s family. Could have been a brother instead of a brother in law. Married my grandmother’s little sister, who is a pistol to this day. My grandmother always complained that he got all of the family land and I guess she was bitter about it. In the end, Frank’s son was the one who re-assembled the Ranch, as it was called and put it in a trust forever. Frank the in-law saved our ancestral lands from development. Ironic, huh?

Sometimes family traditions are big and sometimes they are small. Two of my favorite traditions as a child were church mints and the Cemetery on Memorial day. Church mints were what my grandfather called the little pink peppermints he always seemed to have in his pocket at church. He called them church mints because they were the perfect thing to give to a child who has been sitting too long in church and needed a distraction. These mints were not the normal hard candy, rather they were softly crunchy and pretty strong. Maybe he got them from Delbert, I don’t know. What I do know is I will have church mints or a reasonable facsimile there of for my grandchildren. Why is this a family tradition? Well, my great great grandfather Edwin did the same things with his peppermints. He shared them with his grandchildren, which included my grandfather. i hope to carry this tradition on to the next generation, more than 100 years from the original “church mints.”

Nothing like a cemetery filled with flowers in May. Cemeteries for me are places where treasures are buried, pun intended. Treasures in the form of stories and lives that seemed fantastical to me as a small child. It didn’t hurt that my Grandma Grace was telling the stories, either. She had a love and a knowledge of the people buried there like no one I have ever known. She would walk me around the graves, telling me little tidbits about the mortal lives that were buried there. This person like this person over here but they married other people or this person went off to war or this person loved to dance, etc. It was all very insider only information and I loved it. Still love it to this day. Which is why I love family history and ultimately why I am writing this blog. It all started in the Cemetery with my Grandma Grace. She made those people live in my head and as I have grown older, I wanted to know more. I also realize that I never wrote anything down that my Grandma Grace said. What a loss. I wish I had her back for a week or even a day so I could find out what really happened. Did Great Great Grandfather William really shoot an Indian’s dog from so far away that the Indians couldn’t tell where the shot came from? Why did he rescue the little Indian girl? How did my grandfather feel when his father was killed blowing up tree stumps on a friends farm? Most importantly, who are all these people in the old photographs you saved? I miss her tremendously.

My heritage is rich and varied. My family, in my little town, made it live for me. I hope these words will help make it live for my children and children’s children.

My Great Great Grandfather Edwin summed it up:


In the evening of life when our sun is low
And our thoughts turn back with a glimmering flow
to the years of toil and poverty’s stress
And ask if our lives have been a success.
And the answer comes in the multiplication
Of the second, third and fourth generation

I can tell you Grandfather, your “multiplication” is still persevering.