Michael Woodrum

Mrs. Kathleen Owsley

Advanced Placement English

February 9, 2004

Wilbur Brubaker

Child of the Depression

Wilbur Brubaker, my maternal grandfather, 68, was born on June 6, 1935, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. He now resides in Golden City, Missouri. He came from a long line of farmers, and he still continues the family tradition. He was the oldest of eleven children and he became the father of seven children. Though he was born during the Depression, he says living on a farm and being able to produce food helped his family to make it through the difficult time. He can remember planes taking off and Jeeps rumbling by from the Middletown Air Base to a simulated battlefield during World War II. He is spunky, opinionated and always has a story to tell. He is also friendly and is always ready to lend a helping hand. He says he believes that he has lived a good and productive life and would not change his life even if he could.

I was born on, uh, June 6, 1935 in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. [I was of] the Protestant religion, the Mennonite denomination. I grew up on a farm. My mother grew up on a farm. My dad grew up on a farm. Grandpa owned two farms -- that’s my grandpa. My dad was the second youngest in a family of fourteen children and I’m the oldest of eleven children.

I was three years old when my grandpa [sold his farm] and my dad and mother started farming. Grandpa had a sheep buck and he bucked me over when I was about three and a half years old; and he was my most deathly hated animal as a little boy. The man that bought him took the back seat out of his car and put the sheep buck in his back seat, and I can see him driving out the driveway onto the road from inside my mother’s house; and I was never so glad to see an animal leave a farm. And that’s one of my earliest recollections at about three and a half years old.

I think one of the most memorable happenings to me [was when] I was bringing the cows up the highway one night from the field, down across the bridge, and like this man didn’t have the common sense to stop up at the top of the hill and wait for the cows to go in the barnyard. He had to come sneaking his way down through there, and one of the cows decided to ride the other one. When she did, the cow went by the man’s car real close and her hoof knocked his headlight out. And he jumped out of that car and he was so upset at me; and of course, I was chasing the cows all by him, and I didn’t pay any attention to him. I was just afraid he was going to do something to me, but I wanted to tell him, “If you wouldn’t have been so impatient and stayed up there at the top of the hill it wouldn’t have happened.”

We had to walk a mile to school the eight years I went through grade school. When it gave a snowstorm and the roads drifted shut, why, the parents took the children to school on horseback, and came and got them in the evening on horseback.

I think one of the things that is missing in today’s educational system is our children aren’t being taught the history of the founding of our country in the seventeen, eighteen, and early nineteen hundreds; and the way we growed up in our communities and neighbors helped each other. Ten or twelve neighbors at a local community shared the work and, you know, we were concerned about neighbors who had accidents, misfortunes, barns burned down, and things like that. We didn’t have a lot of insurance those days.

One thing I think I learned in the one-room school was that as you learned and you sat in that same classroom, you had these things refreshed in your mind year after year until you reached eighth grade. And, you know, younger children learned too, probably earlier, because they heard the older classes participating in spelling bees, and things like that. And we had one teacher that taught all the subjects, too, at that time. I remember in grade school, we read the Bible in the morning and we started school with prayer and the Lord’s Prayer; and when I got to high school, the football coach was my homeroom teacher. We weren’t compelled, but anybody who wanted to took their turn [reading from the Bible] as we went around the homeroom. Throughout the school year, we had about forty-two in my homeroom, you took your turn reading from the Bible and the Psalms, and I believe the Proverbs, and leading in the Lord’s Prayer.

We played baseball and we had a game that was--it had four bases, just like baseball, but you kicked a stick and the person who was “it” had to get the stick and tag the home base with the stick before you either got to first, and then you were the person that was “it.” Or if you could get two bases and kick it far enough, why, then the next person got to kick it and made you go around to another base. It was set up pretty much like baseball except it was called “ kick-the-stick.” And then we played “Prisoner’s Base” pretty often on the one side of the school. Our school was right along the macadam road (macadam is a type of road covering), and we weren’t allowed to play across the road; but we did play throwing the ball across the schoolhouse roof from the roadside, and then we would run around the other side and try and hit somebody with the ball and then they were on your team. So, those were about our basic three games that we played.

When I was about, I was about nine when my dad’s last hired man left and then my brother, who was seven, and I, we milked the cows and had to wash the milkers, eat breakfast, and walk a mile to school and be there by eight o’clock, and we were seldom late.

My father growed about six acres of potatoes, and we had to pick up potatoes and then he sold them right at the farm there--had a sign hanging on the corn barn, “Potatoes For Sale with No Sunday Sales”--and so we growed up learning to count money selling the potatoes and helping to load them into customers’ cars at a pretty young age. I was twelve years old when my dad bought the first tractor. And that was a John Deere and then I got to plow, and work ground with it. My father put a saw buck on the front of that tractor and we went around sawing--it was a homemade saw buck mounted on the front of the John Deere “A” and we probably sawed firewood at over a dozen neighbors’ around there for a couple years with it. And then when I was about twelve, thirteen, the neighbor growed a lot of tomatoes, and so I and my brother picked tomatoes and [were] paid ten cents a basket. There was a couple days that I picked a hundred baskets of tomatoes and made ten dollars a day as a fourteen year old.

[During the Depression], we always had enough to eat. We never had a whole lot of play things. My parents had to farm for my grandpa for three years. They just worked for wages, and then when my dad started farming, he took over after Grandpa had [a] sale; and he still had to farm the farm on shares, and so did my uncle who lived on the other farm. And we always had enough to eat. We always had enough clothes, we wore a lot of hand-me-down clothes. They made ‘em good in those days. I wouldn’t wear out mine, so Allen (a brother) would wear the overalls, and then if they weren’t wore out, why Glenn (another brother) would wear ‘em. Mother would line us up about the middle of August after a lot of the potatoes were sold, and she’d measure us all up and two big bundles of clothes would come from Montgomery Ward a day or two before Labor Day. And that was our big school clothes that would last us the rest of the year as we walked a mile to school. But anyway, it was mostly clothes that we got for Christmas presents because that’s mainly what our parents wanted to make sure, that we had warm clothes, you know.

We didn’t really drive much because my dad could only buy so many gallon of gas, and then he had tokens from the government. So we went to see my Grandpa and Grandma Shaffer, which was about fifteen miles [away]; and we only made that trip about once a month in my dad’s old ‘32 Chevy car. But we did go to church every Sunday. We had about seven miles to church, so between that and the tractor [we] burned a little gas; but then after his tractor was warmed up, why it ran on kerosene. Very few tokens the government sent out for people at that time; and of course, the speed limit at that time was only thirty-five mile an hour too. So, you didn’t use so much gas. My dad would peddle potatoes once a week, over the summer, in Hershey, Pennsylvania; and my uncle, who lived on Grandpa’s other farm, he peddled eggs and the young pigeons that we caught at about four to five weeks of age, and clean, and he took those along--sometimes he took extra vegetables. There’s one thing about growing up on the farm--the Bible says he that don’t work, he shall not eat, either. And we learned the meaning of that because we produced potatoes, and green beans, and sweet corn that we sold to other people. So we knew that we were having plenty to eat when we had something to sell, you know, and take to market, to Hershey, [Pennsylvania]. It was also a way for us older children that accompanied my dad to learn to count money and make change and things.

At about fifteen, sixteen years of age, when we had our potatoes all picked up, then my father would take us big boys and go to one uncle who raised potatoes and we helped him pick up his potatoes; and [we] had another uncle who raised tobacco. We learned to cut tobacco with the shears, and to spear it, and hang it in the drying sheds. It was hard work--and it was always in August, just before school started then. We put tobacco away in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I never was tempted to, uh, chew tobacco or even smoke tobacco; and to this day, why, my wife and I require non-smoking areas when we eat and when we travel we ask for non-smoking rooms in motels. I have, uh, worked in a hospital for two years, and, I’ve seen peoples whose lungs were taken out and they were just as black as, the color black; and also to see somebody with cancer of the lungs who never smoked, and they were just as pink as a newborn baby. So, I know there’s a lot of young people today are going to regret it years later who have taken up the use of tobacco, smoking, and, uh, don’t consider their own health and all the money that is wasted on something that does not do the physical body any good.

One thing I remember as about a nine or ten year old, I had a primary Sunday School teacher and we, in our Sunday School class, we learned a verse that went with the lesson each Sunday. And one was from Proverbs, I believe it was the sixteenth chapter, or twentieth chapter, the first verse, “Wine is the mocker, strong drink is raging, and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” So I have--at sixty-eight--I have the first beer to taste yet.

Father always made this statement, and we knew it as children growing up: “Many hands make the work light.” And, uh, so, you know, we would do our potatoes and then my dad would take us three, four older children and go help. I had two uncles that we helped pick up potatoes, and then the one uncle we helped to put tobacco away; and, we did that all usually the two weeks before school because we had our potatoes all done. That gave us a chance to earn a little money and my dad always let us keep what money our uncles paid us for helping. That was, I think, one of the other things we learned--we learned to share. And that’s one thing that [is] lacking in too many children today. With just one and maybe two in the home, there’s so much selfishness. And, uh, you know, they don’t learn to share and, as Dad used to say, “Share and share alike.”

The neighbor had a pond that we did a lot of ice-skating on in the wintertime. You know, there’d be twenty, thirty people from the neighborhood. And then when it’d give a big snowstorm, when the roads got plowed--we’d have ten, twelve neighbors there went to the little same grade school--they’d come up to our farm there and we could sled at about a quarter of a mile downhill there. We all pretty well had a sled. That’s one thing, we had a lot of sleds. And, ‘course, there was three to a pile on those big, Lightning Glider sleds, you know. And the more you had on top of you, the faster it’d go on a good snow-plowed road. So we, with a lot of big families, there was a lot of fun. [The people in the] neighborhood played ball on Sunday afternoons, and today we have televisions. At that time there wasn’t--well there was a little black-and-white television that was already invented, but, ‘course the Mennonite church didn’t encourage any of it’s people to even have ‘em. And I don’t think too many of ‘em even had it, maybe, until in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s; and of course, some of ‘em still don’t have it today. Anyway, uh, I think we were a lot happier [and] grew up with more of a sense of responsibility and playing together. Neighbors knew neighbors and you worked together; and, uh, our school plays and things, the parents had attended it. We had this one instruction from home, and this was what it was: “Just remember, if you get a whipping at school, there’s one twice as hard waiting for you when you get home.” So, our teachers were allowed to use the paddle back then.

[World War II] did [have an effect on me] and I remember the night I came home from school and the Russians had tested their first atomic bomb. I came home from school and our schoolteacher had told us this; and I know I was pretty upset when I got home and I talked to my mother. And my school teacher--for about five years during the war-- her husband was in the military. He was not at home with her; and so that made a lasting impression, too, on a lot of us children. And she could fill us in on some of the happenings.

Of course, I remember the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I was ten years old and the thing that made the biggest impression on me about the war was at the Middletown Air Base, which was just about ten miles west of us. We had squadrons of ten to twenty planes in a squadron take off from the airport up there; and they flew right over our potato field at about five to a thousand, fifteen hundred feet. It was a deafening roar. None ever crashed; but that was something in the fall, in August, when it was hot. And then the biggest thing that made an impression on me--they used the tanks and the half-tracks and the Jeeps when the soldiers practiced from Middletown to Mount Gretna. That [was] a big, what do I want to call, like a battlefield, simulated battlefield where they practiced out there. They drove the hard roads, and they made such a terrible racket with their steel tracks on the macadam roads. We four children would sometimes crawl in the culverts on a nice day just to get away from ‘em because we had to stay off--way to the side of the road--because there would be sometimes two or three dozen of those half-tracks and Jeeps in a row on the highway. So, those things made a lasting impression on me when you had that going right between my parents’ house and barn. None of us ever got hit by a car.

I got hired away from home when I was seventeen. I got hired onto a farm. In fact, I worked on two farms. Let’s see--two month before I was eighteen--and then I got a car and that way I could come home on weekends, and also started to date when I was eighteen.

And then--let’s see--I started dating the fine lady who became my wife in August of the year I was nineteen. She started nursing training in September, and they could not be married while they were in training. [I got married in]--I’ll have to think now--1957. I was hired on a farm as a hired man for two years. I got, my milk and eggs, a quarter of a beef and a half a pig, two hundred dollars a month, and a four room house, half of the house that the boss lived in. That was in spring 1958. Our first child was born on June 20, 1958. Lawrence was born August 22, ‘59. [Evelyn] was born August 1960. Cheryl was born on November 1, 1961. All of the four children were born in the Hershey Hospital in Hershey, Pennsylvania. I started farming on my own in March 1960. And then December 1, 1961, we moved to New York State. David was born in New York State and Nancy was born in New York State and so was Karen. [I moved to Missouri on] July 4, 1976.

I worked as a mechanic for several years for a big implement dealer. We had about thirty-one people hired. I, always believed the Bible when it says that, “Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give an account of some day”--on the judgment day--and I worked with a man who used a lot of “barnyard slang,” uh, the four-letter word for cow manure. He was a real small man, and that was his standard expression when the boss who was about 6’6” would come out with a job sheet for us. He would have to use that word and say, “What in the (blank) is this?” And the boss would put his hand on his shoulder and say, “Now Ed, now Ed, this is just good job insurance.” I was not one to use, uh, a lot of unnecessary language; and so, uh, my fellow mechanic, whose was Ed, he would never use my name, “Wilbur.” When he wanted to talk to me after about four month working with him, he gave me the name “Happy Jack.”

I think in the health field, with Grandma being a nurse, we’re almost fifty years beyond that time now. There’s so, so much more, medical knowledge and advances being made in medicine and open-heart surgery. I just saw a man, this week, who had lost both of his legs because of diabetes. Last summer I saw him in a wheelchair and just this past week I saw him get out of his car with two artificial legs and used a cane to walk through the store. It was so amazing to me; and I think there’s great fields out there for younger people if they will prepare themselves, and it does take an education. And it takes a sense of responsibility to be at work on time and to give a day’s work for a day’s pay regardless of what field you’re in. I think there’s whole new fields of employment that weren’t available fifty years ago because in the early nineteen hundreds about sixty-five percent of the American people were involved in agriculture and growing the food and the fiber for this country and also some of the rest of the world back then already. Today we only have less than two percent of the population of America, approximately two hundred and eighty million, and only two percent growing the food and fiber in our country today. So, it leaves a whole lot of other fields. We’ve seen a lot of changes in the last fifty years that we couldn’t envision happening, you know? When you think of the first open heart surgery being done in 1957. I remember seeing it on television out there in Michigan. And some of that first work was done right there at the University of Ann Arbor. And then to think what we’re doing today. Now they just make a small hole, and they take your appendix out and send you home the same day. All this, uh, what do you call the--laser? Laser surgery today. And people going in and having their eyes operated on with laser surgery and throwing their glasses away. What will we see in the next fifty years? It’s the people that have an education that are going to be able to take hold of these opportunities. I mean, it’s gonna, it’s gonna be another type of service technician. Some people are saying the internal combustion engine will be on the scrap heap in another twenty years from now. Well, they said that too, when the automobile came out and the horse-and-buggies would be on the scrap heap, too; but we still have a lot of Amish and Team Mennonites driving horse and buggies and there isn’t any pollution going into the air. And another area, you know, with these tornadoes and things that have happened here in our area. There’s so much opportunity for people volunteering their time, just visiting with old people, just like, like we’re doing here and letting them tell their experiences. There’s so much of history that those people can relate--the trials and the things that went with raising a family and all that.

I also think of a motto that a dealer gave my parents when I was just a little boy, and it was a picture of a church. And a winding road, and a family that was going to church on a Sunday morning. And on this picture was this writing, “Go to church every Sunday and don’t wait for the undertaker to take ya.” That was what the John Deere dealer gave out one year way back in, I think it was about 1950, ‘51, probably. Mother and Father had that hanging in our kitchen there. The Bible says that he that don’t work shant eat, and our parents impressed that on us a many a time. I had a schoolteacher [that when you said], “Well, I can’t do this.” And her reply was, “’Can’t never did anything, and God only helps those who helps themselves.” My grandfather told my father and my father told us children, “Something gotten for nothing never did anybody any good.” And that was one thing my grandpa, who raised fourteen children, told every one of ‘em, “Something gotten for nothing never did anybody any good.” I guess there’s a lot of truth in that.

[I think that one of my biggest accomplishments was that] we raised registered Holstein cattle up in New York State for twelve years, and we had a real good herd of registered cattle. When I had my cattle sale to move to Missouri, I had an animal go to Spain, one Holstein heifer and one went to Italy. And that was one of the highlights, I guess of dairying in New York State was having registered cattle that people thought enough of, from Spain and Italy, to buy some. Another major accomplishment of living up there where it was so cold--we fed up to a hundred seventy-five head of Holstein cattle and never bought a bale of hay to feed ‘em. Raised a lot of corn silage. And I sold hay into Lancaster County and Connecticut thirteen years out of the fifteen that we lived up there.

One of the joys of Mother and I has been to see all our children become productive citizens of society with good jobs, several of ‘em real good educations, and very successful in their chosen fields of occupation. I think that’s one of the biggest pleasures-- they all learned to work and not to be dependents upon the welfare state. We’ve been thankful for good health and always believed what the Bible said, “Wine is the mocker, strong drink is raging, and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” So, I don’t think too many of my children have got involved in too much alcohol at any time in their life. Another thing is to always be honest, to be fair, and seek to do what’s right. Help along other people when you have the opportunity. Tornadoes and floods and fires destroy neighboring farms and things, we always tried to help out. I think that’s one of the things that we’re here for.

I can’t think of any [regrets that I have]. I probably should have helped some more people out. I’ve been involved in trucking and selling cattle and now selling feed for about twenty-five years. The Bible commands us to, “Do in whatsoever we do, do it hardly as unto the Lord,” and I guess I’ve pretty much tried to do that.

[ ] indicate words that were not spoken by the speaker.

( ) indicate words that were added for clarification.

This oral history was conducted by Michael Woodrum Spring 2004.