By Sue Sylvester
This story is the continuation from last week’s part III story on the Haverty Family.
Mary wrote, “Happiness was family and doing things together. As Jim grew older, he became the official automobile driver in the family. There were house parties to attend and dances were held upstairs at the Rassett Store. However, life was certainly not all play and no work. There were cows to be milked, fields to plant and harvest. Corn was harvested by cutting it by hand and husking part of it by hand in the field, and the rest brought from the field and put into the barn to husk in the winter. The original forty acres grew as ten acres were added about 1920, purchased from the Couettes.”
Jim Dahlseid wrote, “During a good cold snap, there was more talk about the weather than of any time except drought. For a month or so, a solid, firm cold wave might take charge of the Haverty farm. Some days would be clear and cold, others would be stormy and cold. There was windy cold and quiet cold. Kitchen doorsteps were littered with cylinders of ice from frozen water buckets that had been thawed out in the morning with hot water. Storm windows were not enough to keep out the cold, Jack and Mollie resorted to the daily newspaper applied to north windows with thumbtacks. Mornings the thermometer would register ten or twelve below. If you took hold of a latch with ungloved hands, the iron seized you by the skin and held on.”
“One winter day, a whole crew had been out cutting ice and Jim had met with a potentially fatal disaster. The ice was being cut from nearby Rock Lake and was used to stock the ice houses at the creamery. The ice was packed in sawdust and would last well into the summer. The chunks might weigh several hundred pounds, and in the hoisting process, young Jim found himself slipping into an icy hole that his dad had taken 45 minutes to chop. By the time he was rescued and raced to the house, Jim’s bib overalls were one frozen sheet. It was hardly funny, but the way Jack told the story the whole house was shaking with laughter and Jim was doing a stand-up, scarecrow-like imitation of how he, a full-grown husky dude, had tried to extract himself from the frozen denim straitjacket. Jack said it was a close call, we almost had to throw the kid into the fire, clothes and all.”
Dahlseid states, “A farmer goes to great pain to keep his meat cold and his family warm. One of the rewards of winter was that you could butcher a hog and make it last for months without an Amana freezer. All you’d do is hang the carcass from the back yard tree, gut it and eat it as you need. Eventually you might cut up the meat, lay it out frozen in the granary shed, cover it with oil cloth and if the weather warmed up, you’d salt it down. You needn’t worry about the pork spoiling, but the barnyard rodents might take their fair share. Of course, in the summer you’d have to use the well pit to keep your butter and milk from turning sour. The pit was under the windmill, fifteen to twenty feet deep with a pail at the bottom which was attached to a long rope, such was life without an ice box.”