Don Growing Up 2

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           Life was simpler where and when I grew up.

           I will never forget the day my family moved from Ovid to Sterling, Colorado, in January of 1949 when I was 8 years old. I was riding in a truck with my mom and older sister Aggie when I started to complain about my side hurting. Nobody paid much attention. It was just Donnie. But the pain persisted, and my wise sister insisted I be taken to see old Dr. Naugle in Sterling on a Saturday afternoon.

            Dr. Naugle told my parents that I was lucky we came in because my appendix was about to burst. It did, so I was quickly operated on (I think he saved me, since I am writing this). I was hospitalized for two weeks during which time he also removed my adenoids and tonsils. (He must have had a three-for-one special.) I remember being the apple of the nurses’ eyes for a couple of weeks. I was irresistible. (Too bad they didn’t pass this view on to the girls at my school.)

            So I was indisposed for a few weeks, while my three older brothers and one older sister started at St. Anthony’s Grade School and High School. There were other schools in town, but there was no debate. My parents said we were going to Catholic school. I recalled it cost $7 per kid for books. We could not afford that, but somehow Daddy came up with the $35 for five kids. No tuition, thank God.

            While I was home recuperating. I was sitting in our cozy living room (no television) when I spotted two books on a nearby shelf. One was “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” and the other was “The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore,” the bland stories of a family with two sets of fraternal twins. I loved those books, and they started my lifelong love of reading. My parents did not insist that I read. I never saw my brothers and sisters (I was the youngest of 14)  lugging books around. I just stumbled onto the passion on my own.

       When I finally started school in February, after I turned 9, I was put in the third grade class in the rectory basement. My teacher was no-nonsense Sister Carmela. That was okay with me. I liked her immediately.  I was no-nonsense, too. I quickly learned that any complaint of mistreatment at school earned me twice the woe at home.

          I was the lanky new boy with glasses, and I remember Leo Hoffman and another kid tried to beat me up. I was skinny, but I gave better than I got and was looked upon with new respect. I think that’s the first and last fight I ever had.

            I always, humbly I say, did well in school, mainly because I liked it so much. The alternate was farm work, and I apparently preferred books to a hoe. That’s hoe as in garden hoe. I quickly became a pain in the neck to the other kids. I always did my homework, and I always knew the answers. I had a big mouth for a shy kid.

            But I was quickly put in my place. I had not learned to write cursive at my old school, so the rest of the class was ahead of me. Tears came to my eyes when I nobly explained this to my teacher, while she patiently told me to learn to write by copying the board. My wife says that explains my crummy handwriting, the work of a third grade underachiever.

            Farm rigors, of course, started immediately. In addition to sugar beets, sundry other fun activities were added: cutting alfalfa,  stacking hay, grinding corn and hay, hauling ensilage, combining grain, fixing fence, harrowing, plowing, cultivating, milking cows, feeding cattle, and my all-time favorite – irrigating. I loathed and despised watering the crops.  

            I started milking three cows a day twice a day when I was about 10. My brother Larry (five years older) milked three, and Dick milked three. The only problem is, since they were older, they often had things to do on the weekend, while I was at home. Thus, if they did not show up, I had to milk all nine cows.  That happened more than once.

            When we moved to the farm in Sterling, the place was not exactly immaculate. The previous owners, who apparently like to imbibe in the spirits, allowed animals in the house, which included for some strange reason, cows. That, according to my mother, was the last time any creature, except maybe a stray cat, entered our home.

            The other four-footed creatures who inhabited the place were rats. My dad and brothers set out poison, and in the morning we would come out to see fat rats, and I mean fat, drunkenly weaving around. We finished them off with baseball bats and loaded them onto a truck to be hauled away. I kid you not.

            When I was about 13 and my brother Dick and I were the only kids still at home,  we had to dig out wire fences around the pasture buried by sand carried by wind storms. We had to pull the wires out of the post by tractor and roll up the wire with our gloved hands. It was one of the hardest jobs I have ever had.

            Another time, when I was about 12, I was delegated to stay hidden in a hole underground covered by boards and tarp. I would pop out at intervals to scare cattle back into the pasture because the fences were down, and we had not had time to repair them. Only it was raining so I was wet and cold. But I stayed buried underground with candles and books and popped out at intervals like a reluctant jack rabbit.

            I don’t know if it was me or life that was simple.

            Don Lechman is a former reporter, critic and editor for The Daily Breeze. He teaches writing at Harbor College in Wilmington.