Book Cover  •  Table of Contents  •  < PREV Letter:  •  NEXT Letter: >

Letter: 17

June 11, 1995

      DEAR KIDS: Summer is just around the comer. We have been having the usual cloudy May weather and it has extended into June. I like the cool weather because when it gets warm and sunny, it gets too warm. The hot weather makes yard work into hard work.

      We got quite a lot of plums off our two plum trees. Grandma makes us pick them a little before they are as ripe as they should be, because the birds try to eat some of them. I'd rather let the birds have some and have the rest ripe enough. We would have had quite a lot more but Scari tore off some of the lower branches and even jumped up in the air to knock off plums. Craig should have played with her more so that she wouldn't have had to entertain herself that way. We got six apricots off the apricot tree.

      I have been thinking of how good a mechanic, carpenter and cement mason my dad was. I wish that I had had a good camera and film when I was a kid, because I would have liked to take pictures of the machines he made — like his patented sulky rig for towing harrows.

      I have told you of some of the things he made and will repeat myself some in this letter. First of all when he was living on the farm, he wanted to do his own farm machine repairs so he sent away for an anvil and equipment to build a forge. He made most of his own tools like the tongs to hold the things he was heating in the forge and hammering on the anvil. He taught himself blacksmithing and was said to be the best blacksmith in the area.

      A lot of farmers didn't have wells on their farms, which made it hard to have livestock. Pa made a water well drilling rig. A horse would walk in a circle and that would cause the drill pipe to rise up until a gadget would trip it and it would fall into the well hole. The pipe would fill up with mud and they would then pull it out of the hole and drop it on a block and shake the mud out of it. They would have a barrel of water and would pour some water down the hole so that the pipe would pick up the mud. They charged the farmers by the foot. There was no guarantee that they would get water because those farms were north of the Ogalala aquifer which extended from central South Dakota all the way down to northern Texas. There were only pockets of water underground and no one was sure where they were. If you drilled and got water you were lucky. Usually it was enough to have a windmill pump water for the livestock and for household use and maybe a vegetable garden. When they were drilling for water they would continue until they got water or the farmer told them to give it up when they got down a few hundred feet.

      I guess one of them would handle the horse and the other would manage the rig. One time Pa got his hand smashed by accidentally letting the pipe drop on it when they were dumping the mud. They were making money and he didn't think that was important enough to stop work. He found a shingle and tied his hand flat on the shingle and they went on working. Another time the rig accidentally got Uncle Gus on the foot. They thought that was important enough to knock off for the day.

      I told you Pa was a very good carpenter. When he and Mom bought their first house, it was a one-story bungalow which soon was not nearly enough space for all the kids that were coming along. He decided to build an upstairs with four more bed rooms. The local carpenters and house builders all told him he would have to tear the roof apart and then build the upstairs and add a new roof. Instead he sent away for four jack screws and put one at each corner of the roof. He sawed it off the house and raised it with the jack screws, raising the roof and propping it up at each corner until he got the roof high enough to build the upstairs under it. This saved a lot of money and didn't leave the rest of the house exposed to the weather while he was building it. He made a circular staircase to go upstairs.

      I have previously told you how he made an ice sawing machine out of parts from seven old cars. An engine came off one of them. The steering wheel from another raised and lowered the big circular saw. The runners were two angle irons which had the point of the angle on the ice. This guided the saw by following the previous cut, making the ice cakes uniform in size for storage. They also took the ice saw up to Fairbank a time or two to cut ice for Grandpa Spencer.

      The hardware store did a lot of glass work and some of the plate glass was used for shelves in china closets and maybe on a desk top. This required the sharp edge to be rounded off so that no one would be cut by it. They sent away for a couple of glass grinding wheels and Pa made a motorized machine to do the job. He could have bought one but it was less costly to make his own and he knew how to do it.

      When they decided to burn wood to heat the houses — Gus Howard's house, our house, and the hardware store — they didn't want to saw it by hand, so Pa made an attachment that mounted on their Farmall tractor. It had a moving platform that you set the log on to cut it to firewood length. Some of the old cottonwood trees had trunks that were too large in diameter. They were sawed into lengths just short enough to load onto a truck and hauled up to the house. Pa made a wedge that would be pounded into the log with a charge of black gun powder and a fuse leading to the gun powder. That would blast the log in two and then could be sawed. It was quite a spectacle to see those logs being split in two that way, and it drew some spectators. One time Walt Halsey came by and parked his car beside the road at a distance they thought was far enough away. Pa did a little mischief and put a larger charge of the gun powder in the wedge and it blew half the log up in the air and over Walt's car. Walt promptly moved it farther away. It was lucky it didn't hit the car. I split wood after school and threw it down in the basement and stacked it.

      One year after we had had years of droughts, Pa wanted to have a green lawn again, and he made a pumping system to water it. We had a very big front yard and back yard. Blunt was over an underground lake and there was always plenty of water if anyone wanted to pump it out. It was very cold water and we used to cool watermelons in a washtub with it.

      He liked to do a lot of machine work that required a lathe and had one in the machine shop where they did farm machine repairs. He had made a work bench for the basement at home and needed a vise to hold things. He made a wood vise and turned out a screw made of wood for the vise on his lathe in the shop. When I was in Blunt at one of the reunions, I visited the old couple who owned the house at that time. He asked me about the vise and I told him that my dad had made it. And also I saw the coal bin door with our height measurements.

      The machine shop needed an overhead hoist to lift heavy things, especially a tractor engine being rebuilt. He built his own hoist which I think is there to this day. Pa's philosophy was if you needed something, you made it instead of buying it or hiring it built for you. That way he got exactly what he wanted and saved money at the same time. A lot of times he made things better than he could have bought.

      He did the cement work around our house and in the basement. One time he put a cement walk from the back door in the northeast part of the house out to the sidewalk south of the house. About bedtime he went out to inspect it to see if it was set and found that a dog had galloped the full length of the walk It had started to set up, but he was able to trowel out the dog tracks and make a good walk out of it.

      One of their sidelines was to grind feed for the farmers to feed their livestock. The grain was shoveled into the mill hopper but had to be shoveled back into the truck or wagon. This was eliminated by making an overhead bin and with an elevator that put the ground grain in it. Then all they had to do was release the little door at the bottom and let the grain run into the wagon.

      There are a lot of other things he made when he needed them, but I don't need to go into them because he improvised a lot of things as called for. It was convenient to make things because they had a hardware store. The store had bar steel, strap steel, steel rods, all kinds of bolts and nuts and it was unnecessary for him to run around finding the materials to make things with, and of course the cost of materials was wholesale not retail.

      The reason I tell you these things about my dad is that when I got out in the world on my own, I found that he was the most honest, the fairest man, and the kindest man I had ever known. That was somewhat of a handicap in the outside world because I was naive enough to expect most people to be like him but found out that he was a one-er. Pa lived for his family.

Cover  •  Contents  •  < PREV Letter:  •  NEXT Letter: >  •  Page Top