JM:
I understand that you are very tall, about 5' 10".
CA: Well, I got my height
when I was 12 or 13. Boy, I was a string bean.
JM: You must have been a
lot taller than your girlfriends.
CA: I sure was. I sure didn’t
wear high heel shoes many times.
JM: When you were growing
up, what kind of farm did you have, and what did you grow? Did you also have beef cattle?
CA: They had short-horned cows. They’re a dual purpose cow. They give milk, but not as good as the
Holsteins. The short horns were also pretty good beef cows. Mom would always milk more cows than Dad did. She was good at
it. Sometimes she’d get back to the house after it got dark, and she wouldn’t leave the kerosene lamps on for
fear they could start a fire. I would get scared in the house, so I’d crawl under the kitchen table. I’m still
scared of the dark when I’m alone. We lived out of the garden. We canned peas and corn and tomatoes and tomato juice.
And we canned beef. Once, Mom canned a whole bunch of mulberries. My aunt lived right next to us, and they had five mulberry
trees. We’d put an old sheet down and shake the trees, and you had to sort through them and get the bugs out. Then we’d
wash them up and can them. And they were good if you cooked them with red cherries. We get these gallon cans of them. And
we’d also can the mulberries with rhubarb. I had a lot of chickens, and my mom did, too. She got 600 chicks, and that
would give her almost 300 laying hens. She would butcher some of them to eat. Grocery stores in town had little wire pens
in the back, and they had chickens in there to sell. If you had excess fryers, you would take them in there, and people in
town would go in and buy one, and dress it themselves.
JM: How old were you when
you got married?
CA: I was 19. That was 1948.
JM: How did you meet your husband?
CA: We always had extra
tomatoes. I don’t know how they found out that his parents needed some, but they did, and we took tomatoes over to his
parents. He was seven or eight years older than I was. So then he started coming over and we would go to the movies. He was
a good dancer, but he never taught me how. We just went to the movies. That was our entertainment. That was August or September
when I met him, and he gave me a diamond on the first day of next spring. We were married on June 20th. We lived
down by McCool (McCool Junction, about 20 miles from Utica). His dad bought a half-section down there, one half for my husband,
but he and his dad didn’t get along that well. So after about three years, we came back. My grandmother had another
farm, so my folks moved over with her, and we took over the farm. That was about ’51.
JM: When you took over the farm, did you have any children yet?
CA: Yes. I had Gary.
JM: Did you have any farmhands?
CA: No. My dad would help us some. He was still farming. He lived six miles away.
JM: You must have been pretty busy, with a little baby, too.
CA: Yea. And I canned a
lot of stuff, I tell you, jars and jars of stuff.
JM: When you were a girl,
did you ever dream that you would leave the farm, and go away to do something else?
CA: I don’t really know. I took a correspondence course after high school, and I was a secretary
for a while. But I liked to farm.
JM: When you were in school,
did you miss parts of school because of the harvest?
CA: No, I didn’t have
to help. Mom helped out a lot. She was my dad’s right hand.
JM: Did you ever travel
outside of Nebraska when you were growing up?
CA: Yea. Around ’39
or ’40, my aunt and uncle traveled to some sort of seltzer springs in Missouri, for their health, and we rode along
with them. My parents didn’t do that sort of stuff, but we rode along anyway. We went to Arkansas and Oklahoma, about
five states in a week, I think, and traveled about 1,800 miles.
JM: Was that a great adventure?
CA: Yes, it was. I didn’t do many of them. It’s the only one I did when I was a girl. Then
we only went away twice after we were married. My husband won a trip through the Co-op to go out to the Colorado Rockies,
so we went out there for a few days. On our honeymoon, we went away for a few days, also in Colorado, but then he had to hurry
back to shock wheat for his dad. My husband wouldn’t travel, because he’d been in the Army and seen everything.
But I was a homebody, so it all worked out.
JM: Did you ever have any
regrets that you didn’t head off to somewhere else?
CA: No. I always got homesick
when we left. We always had stuff at home to do. We always had chores: chickens and pigs and cattle and dogs and cats.
JM: When John Vachon took the photo, he was working for the Farm Security Administration. The agency was trying to publicize rural poverty in order to get
public support for farm programs, and to document the successful work they were doing. I guess they thought that people
looking at your picture might think you were in a terrible situation and needed help. Even now, people looking at the photo
might react the same way, and think that you had a dismal future ahead of you. How do you feel about that?
CA: I don’t know. Back then, I don’t think I would have felt that way.
