I Loved To Teach

Perhaps we need to arrive at a special point of perception:  the year—1960;  the place—Harlem, Montana, in the middle of the state in the middle of nowhere, six miles or so from Canada at the granary next to the railroad tracks high on a hill across from the local tavern;  the characters—some local yokels, our father-in-law who was the town mayor, who was a successful educator turned businessman, builder, turned farmer;  and finally and most importantly—us, two happy-go-lucky city boys in an antiquated, fully loaded dump truck that had to be cranked to get started.

About the boys, two highly respected men, each named Jack and both married to one of the two daughters (no sons) of two humorless, penurious educators (Leona had taught chemistry, Walter had taught agriculture, served as principal, then superintendent, driven to desperate straits by the great depression).  When 1929 rolled around, their school in Wisconsin paid teachers with promissory notes—teachers said they “ wadn’t worth the dang paper they was written on.”  But Leona believed they was!  And so they bought up with their closely watched saving nearly all those eager-to-get-sold papers for somewhat less than the danged papers said they ‘was’ worth.

Surely enough, those papers paid off at face value, and those two shrewd villains grabbed the first train for Montana to buy an old school building, hire the needy who sat on the low wall around the county courthouse in Chinook for $1 a day, and carefully tore that building down, cleaning bricks and lumber as they went.  First, Walter and his brother Victor helped Leona build two store buildings in the downtown region, then they bought three lots together for houses—one for Victor and Ruth (later sold to buy a dairy farm to keep their four boys in milk ‘n stuff)—one for Walter and Leona and their two girls—and one to sell outright.  The same shrewdness that saw success in those printed notes, saw rent money in those Snake Butte workers getting stone for the Fort Peck Dam (then the largest earth-faced dam in the whole dang world).  As soon as their basement was covered over, it was rented out.  Same for the two floors above the ground.  By the time it was done, it was fully paid for.

In 1934, Virginia was born in Minnesota and during this time in 1936, Margaret joined the household,  their Gambles Store was selling windmills and wringer warshin’ machines, and Walter got busy putting up wind-powered electric-makin’ machines to power them warshers.  They lived at the back of the Gambles Store, which had a crude elevator to the basement that is probably still in use in 2013.  The store featured a wide open staircase to the basement about a third of the way back.  And what does all this have to  do with the story?  Not a dang thing.

When the Goldsmiths bought Minnie Parnell’s farm, about 30 minutes south of town on the other side of the butte in dry weather (although you’d never get home if it started to rain, even though those tough Goldsmiths had built ‘bridges’ over the gullies from materials dumped there by the county (that one-lane mud path was a county highway that was hilly and curvy as had been determined by a sometime stream with no name).  When the gumbo got ‘wore out’ in a patch, it was just moved over about a lane and a half over onto the prairie.

When Walter decided to cultivate that rocky soil, rattlesnakes and all, there was a crude two-room cabin built over a cellar hole reached by a trap door in the kitchen floor and an unfinished attic.  Minnie had taken a cab out there to live for months, leaving a grocery list to be delivered in a month.  Half of the thousand acres was untillable, half of the rest was strip-farmed and was only planted every second year.  In the winter months, a sheep herder brought his flock and his house trailer and took up residence with the deer and the antelope and other critters.  Leona fed the two Jacks lots of meat from the freezer, as she and Walter had become hunters as well as farmers and lived a reasonably civilized life.  As they were determined to pay cash for whatever they bought, they frugally bought old machinery until they could afford newer things.  Walter was, after all, a good mechanic and Leona was an even better supervisor, and by taking parts from the one 1939 Allis-Chalmers tractor to repair the other until about 1966 when they sold the farm for $75,000, which seemed like a fortune to play with in the market, since the farm had cost only $10,000, nearly all of which was paid for by their promising not to drill for oil on the 500 acres they weren’t planting in wheat.  They  also bought fairly modern harvesting equipment as other farmers upgraded their already better stuff.  And they bought a dump truck you had to crank to start up.  And therein lies the tale.

But first, an example of Walter’s humor at one Jack’s expense (mine).  And let me explain that as a singer and actor, I had never felt a need to become muscular, and cranking a 1939 tractor does take a bit of fitness, so I was a bit nonplussed (I guess that should be ‘minus’ or ‘lacking’) when I rode along to the ranch that first time when Walter put the crank in place and asked me to start the ugly orange bison that stood before me, just waiting (I thought) to belch fire.  “Aha,” I told Mr. Jack, “A chance to shine!” No expectations.  No imagination. Little strength.  No experience.  Just a challenge.  I boldly took the crank and grunted heavily.  Three or four times.  “Ug.  Ung.  Ungh.  Grrrungh.”  (It did move!  It moved one cog.)  And then Walter called out, “I believe that’ll do it.”  And he chuckled to himself as he pressed the starter that he called  a ‘booster’, a term I had never heard before.

NEXT DAY.  When Walter (I called him Dad, fully knowing he would have preferred Walter) pulled up near the tractor, I really wanted to impress him and was certain my one-cog pull had helped start the beast.  So I jumped out of the car and hurried over to find the awkward ‘tool’ and smiled as I lifted it, “Want me to crank it again?”  So my kind, oh, so wonderful man must have had a flash of what our life together was to bring to him now that he had to explain his little ‘joke’ of the day before.