THE WAUPACA COUNTY POST

No date marked – possibly 1980’s – likely 1954

 

NEWSMAN STILL ACTIVE AT 90; SON RELATES HISTORY

By John Burnham

 

                        The old man, the printers called him.  Our father.  He was 90 years old the other day, sound of mind and limb, still writing us those almost daily letters commenting on family, on politics, on national and world affairs, each letter enclosing a clipping or two from the editorial page of The Milwaukee Journal.

            Except for a few terms of teaching and a few sessions in the legislature he never lived more than three miles from the farmhouse where he was born. He was county superintendent of schools at the turn of the century when “$800 per year – feed your horse and yourself when traveling,” was a rich plum for a young teacher. He was unhappy in the legislature because a newspaperman just can’t see men and issues in the blind, biased way which brings a success in politics.

            He bought a newspaper on a whim, consolidated half a dozen others in the course of half a century, simply because his political independence bred competition – but his Yankee shrewdness dealt with it in a forthright and crushing manner.

            He was, like all Yankees, tied by inheritance and love to the land where he was born.  His first year’s savings from teaching bought a span of oxen.  He was a remarkable horseman, and had that intangible and instinctive love for animals which brought success with the teams, the dairy cows, brood sows and sheep.  He despised chickens.

            Typical of him was the time, some years back, when he seeded the oats.  He had seeded that piece in wheat when he was a youngster, away back before the turn of the century, in the days when Wisconsin was a wheat state.  It was 68 years later, to the day, when he left the newspaper office one Saturday, drove out to the farm, hooked up a team, put his seed oats in the seeder, and seeded that same little field that he had seeded 68 years earlier.

            The unusual part of it was that he first had to go down to the back woodlot and catch up a team of three-year-old colts, lead them up to the barn, harness them and hitch them.  He had told the hired man to break those colts in the winter, on the sled, when snow was deep and big clumsy colts could be accustomed to harness and a load at their heels.  Supposedly those colts were green broke.

            So the Old Man hitched the colts – to the springtooth, then the smoothing drag, finally to the seeder. It was a beautiful spring Saturday, the hired man and his family were gone for the day, and the Old Man had entirely to himself that farm where he was born, where he had shot bear and deer, where every timber in the barn had been cut on the home place.

            The team was unhitched when the work was done and the colts left in the barn, where they could cool off after their unaccustomed exercise.  And the Old Man got himself a drink of water at the pump in the milkhouse, tossed an extra forkful of alfalfa over to the yearlings in the calf pen, then got into his old car and drove home. We never knew there was anything unusual about that day.

            Not until we saw the hired man a few days alter. He was scared to death when he saw those colts, harness marks indented in their sweaty hair, standing in the barn.  The Old Man “coulda got himself kilt,” the hired man explained.  Then he confided:  It was easier to use the old barn team with chores, and a man with a string of 25 cows to milk had plenty to do without spending his winter breaking colts.  And that was why those colts never had been hitched before – even though the Old Man had been assured that they were worked frequently.

            The hired man died a few years ago, at an appropriately autumnal hour of his life.  The Old Man was one of his pallbearers, out at the country church a couple miles past our home farm.  And the Old Man stopped off at the farm on his way back to town, forked a little alfalfa over to the young stock and took a look around.  He always taught us, the Old Man did, to keep plenty of leafy alfalfa in front of growing calves.