Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Dad: Sept 1, 1930 - Jan 20, 2020

Great eulogy. Sorry that you lost your father.

Dad was born in Perry Ok 9/1/30. His parents had a small farm with milk cows, chickens, and turkeys, which they lost in the dust bowl.

The Drs told them that Grandma was going to die if they did not get her out of Oklahoma and the dust bowl conditions. So Grandpa and Grandma loaded six kids into the model T, tied the family's mattresses to the top, and headed west. Dad was third of the six kids. He had two older sisters, two younger sisters and a younger brother.

The family ended up in Scotts Bluff Or in Harney County, just off the Nevada state line. They lived there for a few years. Dad was eight years old when his four year old brother threw a pitchfork off from the top of a haystack. The fork penetrated the knee cap and passed through the knee joint, which became infected. There were not much in the way of antibiotics in those days. Dad was layed up for most of a year before the infection cleared and he was allowed to use that leg again.

During Dad's early teen years, his parents bought 160 acres of sagebrush in a brand new irrigation project outside of Caldwell ID. It was very hilly and chopped into many small fields. But once they grubbed the sagebrush out, it could all be farmed

The knee remained rigid for the rest of Dad's life. By the time dependable knee replacements became available, that stiff knee was such a part of his identity that he refused to have surgery on it. Dad spent his young life self employed as farm labor, proving to the world and himself that he was a better man than any out there with two good legs.

When I was five years old, Dad started putting me on the tractor. Any tractor. He bucked bales locally for anyone with a field to stack. 5 cents a bale for strings, or 8 cents for wire tie. Usually the farm supplied the tractor and Dad had his own specially built two wheeled hay trailer built close to the ground so he did not have to lift the bales so high.

We would work from daylight until about 2:00 PM then go home for lunch and a rest. If the field was close enough to home we would go back out to the field for a few hours in the evening. I witnessed Dad lift 1000 bales from the ground to the trailer and then into the stack in a single day on more than one occasion. He did this with no elevator at the stack or on the wagon. Just me at five or six or seven years of age to drive the tractor through the field.

He bought a little twenty acre place and put a one room shanty on it in 1955. My sister and I were born in that shanty. The property never did have running water until I purchased it thirty years later. Water was transported in ten gallon milk cans to the home and heated on the stove for sponge baths.

In 1968 he purchased an additional 290 acres of ground, for $12,000. The property only had fifty acres of irrigable ground. The rest was cheat grass dry land which we grazed in the spring.

Over the next six years we built our Holstein herd to 100 head counting calves and replacement heifers. It was more than our property could support so we leased another 200 acres with irrigation for 80 acres. Mom, and my younger sister, younger brother, and I milked as many as 35 head each night and morning by hand. We got a vacuum pump and mechanical milkers in the summer of '74 when I was headed to College and my sister to boarding school for her last year of High School.

It was 500 acres of pheasant paradise. From start of season till the end every year my brother and I were out with our dogs and shotguns every day. Dad never hunted birds, but he reveled in the hunting my brother and I did.

Dad was a big game hunter. Everyone in the community knew how poor our family was. And the community was amazed when Dad came home in the early 60s with a new Remington 760 in 30-06 and a Bushnell 3-9x40 Scopecheif. That is still a fine optical instrument which I have mounted on a rifle and am proud to carry.

Dad went hunting, back in the '60s with five loaded mags in his various pockets, and often two more boxes of ammo in his saddle bags. I have seen him come home forty rounds shy of when he left that morning. But there would be several dead deer and perhaps a couple elk up on the mountain waiting for tags and transport.

The only thing that counted was keeping the freezer filled. Besides, it was not really poaching, he thought, as long as it all had someone's tag when it came home. And nothing ever went to waste. I remember getting many a phone call at home. "We had a flat, we need a spare tire." Or two spare tires. Mom would jump in the car and head to the hills with her tags.

The toughest thing Dad ever dealt with was the loss of my younger brother in 1980. Brother was just 20 years old. He fell asleep at the wheel and wrapped his 71 Torino around a telephone pole.

That was the beginning of the end for Dad and Mom's marriage. They got more and more distant over the next four years and were divorced shortly after my first child was born in 1983.

The divorce meant the farm had to be sold and proceeds divided. Dad and Mom each had $12,000 after all the bills were paid. Dad bought his one and only new car in his life. A 1984 Toyota Celica, because by then I had owned two Celicas and a new Toyota pickup.

Dad kept one acre of ground and the old shack from the 60s. He still had no running water and refused to let me pipe water into the house. Instead we put a frost free hydrant near his door and he had an outhouse fifty yards away below the garden. I bought the remaining portion of his original 20 acres and raised my kids beside him.

About 1995 he met my stepmom. A wonderful kind lady who adopted my kids as her own grand kids. She would slave all day in the garden and then they would usually go home to her place. My son spent days and days out in that garden with his Grandpa hoeing and hilling the sweet corn crop. Dad and Step Mom usually had all of my kids out to some pond or fishing hole somewhere when ever it was warm enough to do so.

With Dad's crippled leg and the loss of the farm he had no means of support. He went on SSI and has lived on about $300/mo since 1985, and saved considerable amounts from that.

But that leg finally got the best of him and shortly before his 82'nd birthday he started falling down in Step Mom's house and it took paramedics each time to pick him up and get him back on the couch. On 7/2/12 we moved him into a nursing home. He has not been able to stand for nearly five years. He has been wheel chair and bed bound.

Wed Jan 8 he became unconscious. Diagnosis: low blood pressure which induced kidney failure compounded by tracheal bronchial malaise (collapse) We removed life support Sat Jan 11. He never again became conscious.

His tough old body finally gave up the fight this morning. Heartbeat and respiration ceased about 9:30 AM this morning.

Dad is gone, to be no more, forever.

Sorry to hear this.

Fathers like them or not most just tried to the best they knew how with what they had.

Mine did.