Making it Count
Well-Known Member
I always enjoy hearing what people did or experienced in an earlier time of life and hold that in high regard. So I will start.
Great Grandpa and the Farm
I couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5 years old the first time my mother had me steer the Case tractor while sitting on her lap. I believe we were disking but I couldn’t swear to it. It was my great grandfathers big white Case tractor before they turned into Case IH. Growing up in rural Indiana it was corn and soybean fields that filled my early childhood. My cousins and I would play in the old grain wagons rolling around in the freshly harvested crops or swinging from a rope and dropping into piles of loose straw in the old barn with the large hay loft.
My great grandfather was one of kind. My mom said she wasn’t ticklish because he had tickled it all out of her when she was younger. See, he used what was left of his left hand to tickle all of us cousins as well. When he was much younger he actually had to cut his own hand off to keep from being killed. The story goes, while out harvesting corn by hand and throwing into what I understand it as an old corn picker, somehow the machine grabbed him and would have pulled him in and killed him but he used the large blade he was using to cut down corn stocks to cut off his own left hand just beyond the joint. He then walked nearly an hundred yards to his home to call for help.
It was the perfect tickling tool. He still had the movement of the wrist but only an inch or so past the joint still remained. He was well known for it and his amazing horseshoe throwing. He won many horse shoe tournaments but unfortunately that’s something I never saw him do. He always had chewed cigars laying around in his study. He stopped smoking them well before I was born but found that chewing them was just fine. I am not sure if my great grandma approved of half chewed cigars laying around the house but o well.
It wasn’t but a year or so later grandma passed on and grandpa a few years after that. The farm was sold at auction because my mother and father didn’t have the money to take it over and operate it. I wonder if it’s because I didn’t get to experience more of those times and people that I remember it so fondly. I feel times were simpler back then but what do I know, I was just a kid that enjoyed every minute I can remember of it.
Great Grandpa and the Farm
I couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5 years old the first time my mother had me steer the Case tractor while sitting on her lap. I believe we were disking but I couldn’t swear to it. It was my great grandfathers big white Case tractor before they turned into Case IH. Growing up in rural Indiana it was corn and soybean fields that filled my early childhood. My cousins and I would play in the old grain wagons rolling around in the freshly harvested crops or swinging from a rope and dropping into piles of loose straw in the old barn with the large hay loft.
My great grandfather was one of kind. My mom said she wasn’t ticklish because he had tickled it all out of her when she was younger. See, he used what was left of his left hand to tickle all of us cousins as well. When he was much younger he actually had to cut his own hand off to keep from being killed. The story goes, while out harvesting corn by hand and throwing into what I understand it as an old corn picker, somehow the machine grabbed him and would have pulled him in and killed him but he used the large blade he was using to cut down corn stocks to cut off his own left hand just beyond the joint. He then walked nearly an hundred yards to his home to call for help.
It was the perfect tickling tool. He still had the movement of the wrist but only an inch or so past the joint still remained. He was well known for it and his amazing horseshoe throwing. He won many horse shoe tournaments but unfortunately that’s something I never saw him do. He always had chewed cigars laying around in his study. He stopped smoking them well before I was born but found that chewing them was just fine. I am not sure if my great grandma approved of half chewed cigars laying around the house but o well.
It wasn’t but a year or so later grandma passed on and grandpa a few years after that. The farm was sold at auction because my mother and father didn’t have the money to take it over and operate it. I wonder if it’s because I didn’t get to experience more of those times and people that I remember it so fondly. I feel times were simpler back then but what do I know, I was just a kid that enjoyed every minute I can remember of it.
