Jean Courter Marchand was born in 1921 and grew up in the Climax area. In 2000, she wrote this article on her memories and perspective of events and people she came in contact with, focusing more on the first twentytwo years of her life.
“The turmoil on Wall Street and the related financial problems were only one of the heavy hits my parents and other Kansas citizens took. The dust storms that blew much of western Kansas soil into Texas began in the early 1930s but I, in eastern Kansas, wasn’t aware of significant problems until the mid 1930s during some extremely dry years. On several days in spring, the noon sky began to look yellow, and by four o’clock, the dust had clouded the sun, so visibility was less than one hundred feet. The chickens thought it was nighttime and they headed for their roosts in the chicken house. Planted crops were smothered by soil drifting onto them or they were uprooted when soil around them was blown away. My parents hauled water in ten-gallon cans for all drinking and cooking. They drove to Eureka to fill the milk cans with water because Eureka did have a city water department. Water from a well near our house was unsafe to drink, but it was not wasted. The same bath water was used successively by several family members. I was usually first to bathe, then it was my brothers’ turn, then my parents. Most often the bathtub was a galvanized laundry tub with a couple of gallons of water in it because that tub was smaller and so it took less water than the porcelain tub in the socalled bathroom. Of course, if the water was to be of comfortable temperature, it had to be heated on the wood fired stove, not a wise move on a hot summer day. Used laundry water, bathwater and dishwater were poured on flowers. Often in summer, the rinse water was poured on the front porch; the south wind blowing over it in the house did provide a small measure of “air conditioning.”
“I recall the night dad returned from Kansas City, where he had traveled by train the previous day with a load of cattle to be sold on the market there. Mom drove our Model A Ford with us three children to Eureka to meet him on his return home. Mom asked him how the cattle sold and he had to tell her that, contrary to his expectations, the money he received was less than the money invested in raising them, there was no money at all to reward us for the year’s labor involved. Mom cried.
“Dad was the first in the township to terrace to prevent erosion into gullies. He bought a self-delivery rake which cut in half the labor of raking hay. He improved his herd of cattle with the purchase of a purebred bull, and as I will describe later, he installed an electrical system for our family. Actually, Dad and Mom together made these decisions in a time when women usually did not fully participate.
“But Dad was not always receptive to new ideas. For the first years that hybrid corn was grown in our community, Dad refused to believe that it would ever replace conventional varieties. He was one of the last farmers to purchase a tractor to replace the teams of two or four horses that usually worked the fields.
“The grinding poverty musthavebeenexcruciating for my parents. I have often thought that farmers are the consummate gamblers, as they never know what return they will receive from their labor. Although I was somewhat aware, I did not fully appreciate, until later years, the sacrifices they made. Thanks to their hard, physical work, we were never hungry because we had milk and eggs and usually some fruit and vegetables, all home grown. Several times each week we had chicken or beef or pork, all produced on the farm. My college American History teacher commented that, on the frontier, the man who could split the most logs (work the hardest) was the man most respected in the community. In my mind, that was my dad. It was common practice for farmers to exchange work with their neighbors during the summertime when many tasks such as threshing, silo filling and haymaking required several workers. My dad enjoyed working harder and faster than the other men on the crew, then he would come home at dark to milk the cows.
“My parents milked cows and sold the cream as a source of income. This meant rising at five o’clock, milking ten to fourteen cows by hand, bringing the milk to the house to be run through the hand operated cream separator, eating breakfast with the whole family together and then by seven thirty, Dad taking the skim milk to the hogs. His next chore was, in winter, feeding the cattle and hogs, or in summer, going to the field to plow or cultivate the crops. My mother got up when Dad did. Before she went to the barn to milk three or four cows, she started a wood fire in the cast iron kitchen stove. The oven was hot when she returned twenty minutes later and she would wake us kids up, then mixed up, without measuring cups or spoons, consistently delicious baking powder biscuits in her white enameled bowl. She put them in the oven to bake for fifteen minutes and by the time they were done, dad had brought the milk from the cows he had milked and run it through the cream separator. The house, the garden and the chickens were Mom’s responsibility, in addition to her share of the milking. Not only did she plant and weed the garden, but also, she picked the garden produce which she cooked for dinner at noon, our main meal. She baked four loaves of bread and a pan of rolls every week or two. Bread was our staff of life, along with milk. She canned fruit, vegetables and meat for winter meals. In times of special need, she drove a team of horses to cultivate a crop while Dad did some other farm chore.
“Each April, my parents ordered two hundred baby chicks which arrived by rural mailman, and these chicks had to be protected from cold, hunger and predatory animals like rats and wild dogs. This meant half a dozen or more trips each day to the brooder house to see that the chicks had feed, water and heat. In the brooder house, they were kept warm during April cold snaps by a kerosene burning brooder stove, in addition to the heating unit, it had a three-foot diameter metal disc eight inches above the chicks to concentrate the heat on them. Mom never believed in eating young chickens until they weighed at least three pounds (about ten to twelve weeks old) because she thought the cost benefit was not there at a lighter weight. We eagerly looked forward to the first fried chicken each summer.
“In the evening, there were other chores to be done, the chickens to be fed, eggs to be gathered and of course, cows to be milked for the second time of the day. The field work had to be done when the soil was right, the season was right, so often Dad worked in the fields until nightfall, then came to the barn and unharnessed and fed and watered the horses. He did the milking with a kerosene lantern as the only light. Mom also milked her same three or four cows. Then it was supper time for all the family, often as late as nine o’clock in the summer time. At every meal there were bowls of fresh or canned fruit, bread, butter, honey and other sweet spreads for the bread, and of course, a large pitcher of milk. In winter, there was also soup or another hot dish. After a summer day of temperatures of one hundred degrees, it was not a good idea to fire up the wood burning cookstove in the evening and by doing so, heat up even more the already hot house for sleeping. For most of my growing up years we had no electricity. The nearest place to purchase ice was in Eureka, sixteen miles away, and no one had the money to obtain it. Our “refrigeration system” was a bucket on the end of a rope dropped twelve feet, just above the water, into the hand dug well near the house. Milk from a glass jar in that bucket was still sweet at suppertime and we liked the cool milk better than the warm milk from the evening’s milking.
“Gathering eggs was sometimes an exciting event. In those days, chickens were generally free to roam as they wished in the daytime, even though their house was shut up for the night to keep out preying animals. With their free range, hens were able to lay their eggs in unusual places, not always in the nests provided for them in the chicken house. Sometimes a nest would not be discovered until the eggs had been incubated under the hen for the twenty-one days necessary for the baby chicks to develop and hatch. A cook was sometimes surprised when she cracked an egg to bake a cake and found a partially developed baby chick. Snakes, as well as people, found eggs good eating. Grandma Devier reached into a nest for the eggs she expected to be there and she pulled out a large bull snake. She was quite unfavorably impressed. Grandma had an egg of china which she placed in a hen’s nest to suggest to the hens where they should lay their eggs. The china egg disappeared, but shortly after, Grandpa killed a large bull snake which had a lump in his middle and Grandma retrieved it.
“I wasn’t always the angelic being I picture myself. I read on one of those Books of Knowledge in the grade school library that some smart person said that if you squeezed an egg with equal pressure on all sides, you would find it impossible to break the egg. I thought that an interesting concept to explore. One evening after I had gathered the eggs from the nests in the chicken house, I picked an egg for my experiment. As I have said, eggs along with cream were the source of income for the family. I squeezed the egg and to my dismay, the shell broke and I had egg yolk running between my fingers. My mother happened to observe the experiment and she was not pleased by my scientific curiosity. She got a switch off a nearby tree and I grabbed it from her and threw it away. That was not a wise move. I do believe that was the last time I got corporal punishment!
“In 1929 my parents installed a second-hand Delco system to generate electricity. This was quite a progressive move. Electricity in Kansas was available only in the cities. I believe only one other farm family in the entire township had electricity. The thirty-two-volt Delco system consisted of a generator, which ran on kerosene, and a set of sixteen batteries, each with about a two-gallon liquid capacity. The house had a drop light in each room and the barn had a light in the horse area and another in the milking area. We thought we were pretty modern. In the house the electricity was used, other than for light, for an electric iron and to turn the cream separator and the washing machine which Grandpa Courter purchased for my mother. One neighbor worried that the electric light, probably a fifty-watt bulb, was so bright that it would damage our eyes. The system was limited in wattage and whenever four lights were turned on the generator would automatically run. It was important to be certain the kerosene tank was filled so the generator could run and the batteries would keep their charge. One of the batteries had an indicator, a ball, that moved down when the electrical charge was down, that was a signal to manually run the generator to recharge the batteries. Sad to tell, after less than three years the used system failed and for the next five years, we again relied on kerosene lamps for light in the house and barn. Finally, the weather and the market for farm products improved, so Dad and Mom could purchase another Delco system. They had considered tapping into the cross-country transmission line that was four miles away, but the expense of a connecting line made that impractical. By 1941 the Rural Electrification Authority (REA) was finally reaching farms in some parts of the state, but it was not yet available in the area of my home until after World War II.
“Dad had milked cows from the time he was a very young boy, so he was an expert. While our first Delco system was operative, the hardware dealer in Eureka prevailed upon Dad to let him demonstrate what a benefit a milking machine would be on our farm. Dad reluctantly agreed. George Straight and another man came with their equipment and plugged into our electrical system to show Dad what a great piece of equipment he could purchase. Two cows were herded into the milking barn, their heads put in stanchions to keep them in place, and the milking machine was attached to the teats of the first cow. She had never heard such a loud noise, nor had she ever felt something tugging on teats in such an unpleasant manner. She expressed her feelings about the whole thing by kicking the milking machine several feet and spilling the milk in the can. Bad deal! Tried the second cow and it was not cooperative. Finally, Mr. Straight gave up and took his milking machine back to Eureka in defeat and Mom and Dad milked the rest of the cows by hand. Dad was as fast as a milking machine and he milked cows for sixty years.”
