It was a scary time as school approached. I was always one of the youngest in my class. I remember my mother saying that it wasn’t fair that my birthday was always in the middle of combining grain or baling hay.
I had recently turned 6 the year we moved from Mink Creek in southeast Idaho to Parma, in southwest Idaho. I remember starting school at Mink Creek and being comfortable there because there were some older cousins at the same school. At the old Ten Davis school there was no one.
The move seemed like its own odyssey. Dad bought a 1950 or 1951 Ford F-6 truck for the move. Instead of the venerable flathead V-8 engine, Dad opted for the optional six-cylinder engine, which was more powerful than the V-8. I remember Dad mentioning that someone had tried to sell him a Diamond-T truck instead. They had tried to sweeten the deal by offering Dad a paying load of freight he could haul back if he took a bus and then picked up the new truck straight from the factory.
Dad went on that he did not want a Diamond-T truck, and he definitely wanted no part of hauling a load of somebody else’s freight halfway across the country. The Ford did very well. One flat tire was its only issue.
The only excitement I remember from the move was when a drunk driver swerved across the road in front of us and rolled his car beside the road. My Uncle Reed Jensen was with us that trip, and I remember he and Dad pulling the driver from the wrecked car. Dad turned pale when he realized that my mom and younger sister had been following behind us in the Studebaker and had been looking for a place to pass. That would have put them in the path of the rolling car.
Machinery and household goods came. I don’t remember the order. Then the youngstock, the calves and Patsy, the saddle horse. I remember boxes being stacked around the front of the narrow-front Case SC model tractor when it was loaded. I remember Dad blocking our gravel road for a few minutes when he backed the truck up to a bank and drove the tractor off.
Then, after a few days of settling into the new digs, I heard my parents talking about finding the school for Bradlee. I objected, insisting I was just fine. But I was overruled, and off to the Ten Davis school we went. At first all eight grades there in three classrooms. Then they started busing the older kids to Parma, so each classroom only had two grades. My favorite person was Mrs. Harris, the school cook and usually the sole lunchroom person.
The first season, Dad’s cousins came from the Dixie area near Notus and baled Dad’s hay. Then Dad got a used baler – the best he could afford. Four-banger air-cooled Wisconsin engine that sounded awesome. But it was a hand-tie wire-tie baler. Dad sat on one side feeding pre-cut wires with a loop on one end through the needles, and Mom sat on the other, joining the two ends and wrapping the long end so the bales stayed baled.
My eighth and ninth birthdays were on the seat of that SC Case tractor. Steering it around the field to pick up the windrows of hay and moderating the speed so the Wisconsin V-4 was neither loafing or being overworked and killed. Usually on my birthday.
One day, fairly early evening after chores and supper, my mother gave me a pocketknife. She said that at least we remembered to get you a present for your birthday this year. I thought it was the best birthday ever. I actually had that little simple two-bladed pocketknife for four or five years until I either finally lost it or replaced it.
Dad showed me how to anchor it by sticking the point into some exposed wood in the barn and then use a file to rough-sharpen it.
I remembered that it was my birthday each Aug. 17. But that day was usually filled with driving that tractor pulling that baler. The lack of a birthday party just didn’t matter to me because I knew both my parents were kinda busy. Ya. Mom wore out a pair of canvas gloves each day.
We had to travel to my grandfather’s funeral at Ogden, Utah. Dad had me on the tractor pulling a disc the night before we left. He milked the cows and did the chores alone that night. I finished the field as dusk turned to dark. The next afternoon, at Ogden, I overheard Dad talking to relatives.
“If that 8-year-old boy had not been able to disc that 20-acre stubble field yesterday, we wouldn’t have been able to even come.”
That mattered. To hear my dad bragging on me behind my back to relatives.
