Henry’s Memories

Since the last post focused on Bea’s story, it seems appropriate to follow up with her husband Henry. The following comments (another treasure from Carolyn) were made by Henry at the 1990 family reunion. I understand that Henry’s blunt honesty ruffled a few feathers at the time. I trust that, another three decades removed from the reunion, we can all enjoy getting to know our ancestors a little better, warts and all. (The following has been gently copyedited to improve its readability.)

In 1986 I came to this community to attend the fiftieth anniversary of my graduation from Lushton high school, and Dave and Maxine (Regier) took me to the airport. On the way, Dave asked if I would give a talk about the Peter Buller family. Well, in 1986, later in that year when you had your reunion, my wife had an operation, and I opted out. In 1988 would be the next logical time, but we had already made plans to travel to Spain and Portugal, France, Belgium, and Germany, so that didn’t work. Well last year, later in September or October, Sarah had her ninetieth birthday, and we were here and at a meeting (I think it was at Fred’s) where they gathered some of the brothers and sisters. Dave asked me to say something interesting about the Peter P. Buller farm—now that’s the rub. Ever since he said that, I’ve been thinking how in the world can I, like Alpheus in the Middle Ages, turn lead into gold or a sow’s ear into a silk purse, because I really don’t know if I have anything interesting to say about the Peter P. Buller farm. Now before I go on, I’ll give you a little bit of an outline of what I will talk about.

First I want to talk about the time frame, then [the] early years, work habits, and management of Peter P. Buller—my father—then I have a little item—“I have a dream”—and then the last thing is Dad’s greatest asset.

So, now the time frame: if Dad were with us today, which is somewhat improbable but not impossible, he would be 121 years old. Now I say that is improbable but not impossible because in February on the Today show I heard Willard Scott wish a man in Georgia happy birthday who turned 120. So 121 is not impossible. Mother would be 120 years old on the first of October this year because she was born October 1, 1870—or to put another little time frame on this, if they were living, they would have celebrated their one hundredth wedding anniversary on February 27, 1990, because they were married exactly one hundred years before. So that gives you an idea of the time I have to cover, but I’m not going to cover it all.

Now the first years after the wedding, I presume Dad came to live on the farm with Mother, on the Cornelius Epp farm, her father. And what we now take for granted is that when a young couple gets married … they go on a honeymoon. I think their honeymoon was in the corn field or the hay mow or wherever they might want to find themselves on the farm.

I’m not even sure whether Dad was farming—he was working on the farm, but in any case an extra hand on the farm was very welcome because farming was much more labor intensive than what it is now. For plowing, they had a walking plow, and for much of their mowing they had a scythe, and they made do with that. Grandpa Epp, as far as I can establish, was a self-sufficient farmer; in crops, for example, he had wheat, which he took to the mill for flour. He had rye, which was also taken to the mill for flour to make rye bread. Oats were for the horses, corn for the hogs and chickens. He had horses, cows, sheep, and hogs. Now sheep were not that common—I don’t think in this community—but I guess my Grandfather Epp thought he would have the wool and the sheep skin to use for clothing and so on.… And in the fowl category, they had chickens, geese, and ducks—chickens for the eggs and geese and ducks for the down because they had to have something to put in the pillows. Much of this work was very primitive in terms of machinery and so on; it just didn’t exist.

I don’t know exactly—I’ve already said—between 1890, when Father married Mother and came to the farm, until 1894, what kind of arrangement they had. I assume perhaps that Grandfather Epp was still farming, that is, he was managing the farm with his son-in-law Peter P. Buller as an extra hand, but I have this as 1890–1894 because in 1894 Grandfather Epp died, and that just left Grandma Epp, who died two years later. I am sure that from 1896 Mom and Dad were on their own on the farm, because Mother inherited a portion of the farm, and I suppose they made arrangements with some of the other brothers that she had and a sister about who had what. Actually, one of her brothers, Klaus, I think, he had gone to Minnesota earlier, and he met someone there, a lady, and they were married in 1890 also, and after their wedding they moved to North Dakota and then into Canada about 1895, and then Klaus’s brothers Peter and Chris followed him in 1902 and 1907. Well, that’s all I have to say about the early years because once Grandpa and Grandma Epp passed away, I am sure Dad and Mom were very well established on the farm.

Now the work habits and management of my father. One of the things Father tried to impress us with—that is, the boys and girls who were still at home—is that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well. For example, when he made something where a 2 x 4 board would have been sufficient, he would insist on a 2 x 6. Now you and I know that extra weight is not always appropriate. But if he wanted to build a building, he wanted it to last, and in other things he wanted it to perform well. For example, in plowing of a field Dad would usually go a day ahead and pace off the area and put up flags where the plowing was to take place. They were always supposed to be in straight lines and so that the next year he would pace it off again where the furrow had been so that the hump on the first round trip the plow would make, it would throw the dirt both in the same row, then it would be eliminated. Of course, that little hump was pretty well gone with the disking and harrowing that took place after the plowing, and he wanted his furrows to be in straight lines if the field was straight, and most of the fields were straight.

Fencing: if we did any fencing, Dad would insist that, when we put in a new post, we always lined it up with the other poles, and the poles had to stand straight up, not crooked. Of course, sometimes we used mulberry posts, and they were not always so straight, but we had to “rig” them around where they would be straight.

In yard care, the lawn and vegetable garden didn’t really interest Dad at all. Well, he wanted Mom to have a vegetable garden for the beans and all the other vegetables she might raise, but he didn’t really care much about it.

There was another habit that Dad had that I didn’t appreciate so much at the time, but I’ve since learned it had value: when he walked around the place between the buildings and he saw a nail or piece of glass, he would pick it up and drop it at the corner of some building. He had three or four different places where he gathered over a period of months. Of course, this glass was picked up because the tires at that time couldn’t stand very much in the way of sharp edges, and then after he had accumulated quite a bit, he would see to it that I got a pail or some box, and then I would have to go around and pick that stuff up. I took it to the ditch or a washout ditch, and we would have to dump it there because he didn’t want it on the farm. Now I didn’t think much about it, but one of the neighbor boys came over one time, and he said your yard is so clean, and he was referring to the fact that those nails and pieces of glass had been taken care of. Another thing I remember about Dad’s working habits was that everyday after breakfast he would have a little session with us and he would say, “Now Chris, you do so and so, and Henry you ask Mother what needs to be done in the garden,” and I think this is one of the reasons farming was not very interesting for me. I was always left with cleaning the chicken house and other detestable errands. I couldn’t go out to do the plowing or harrowing—I did do a little but not very much. I was in the spot of “being nice to the baby.”

Now in terms of the harvest, Dad was mostly a wheat farmer. He was never forced to sell when the grain was harvested. Now I know that sometimes when the grain is harvested it is at the highest price, but not always, and if Dad thought the grain was priced too low, then he would store it and take it to the elevator later on. I remember during the Depression when corn was 8¢ a bushel and wheat was 12¢ a bushel my Dad didn’t sell any grain for at least two maybe three years. Now this also occurred about the time of the drought, and we didn’t have too much to store some of those years, but we had corn stacked up in those wooden frames that we built like a silo. Now then some of this corn that we picked when it was in the 8¢ range we sold when it was in the 60¢ range, and the wheat that he would have sold for 12¢ a bushel when we harvested, we finally sold for $1.15 a bushel, and I might say that was in 1933 when he did all that selling, and he was able to buy a straight-8 Pontiac that was the newest car in the community at that time. My brother Pete also got a new car; it was a Chevy of some sort.

As far as I was able to tell, here I might say Dad never divulged any business aspects of the farm and that also probably because, when I was out on the farm during the later years, I plowed up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down—it wasn’t very interesting to me, and I always wondered what good do we get out of this. I never knew if we would get $10 an acre profit or $50 or $100, because Dad never said anything about his business. About the same time Dad felt there was only one occupation that was good enough for us: farming. And as far as I knew Dad always had good credit at the bank, so if he needed money, he could go and get it, and that was not always the case.

Now he did lose a few deposits here in Henderson—there was a Henderson State Bank at one time and there was another state bank; I think it was the Kroeker State Bank—and he lost two deposits, but after a couple of years they paid 97½¢ on the dollar and the other 90¢ on the dollar, but in the meantime he didn’t have that money and had to get along without it.

Now I have a dream: Sometimes in their farming, not me but my sisters and brothers were indebted to the parents, basically to Father. There is an old adage that says if you want to make a friend an enemy, loan him or her some money, and that was true also with Dad’s plan. That was one of the flaws I saw in Dad’s plan, because when Chris or Ben or whoever was indebted to Father, he assumed the right to do a little managing, and that was not always very pleasant. I thought it would have been much smarter if Dad had said, I will give you 40 acres, and you go to the bank and borrow enough money to pay for the other 40 acres, and then they would have owed the money to the bank and not Father. I think that would have improved family relations considerably, because whoever is your creditor assumes the right to mess in your affairs when things don’t go right. Now only Ann and I never played that game. In 1944 when I was in Europe doing relief work, Mother convinced Dad to give Ann and me 40 acres without the condition of buying 40. Now all the others bought 40 and, so to speak, bought 80 for the price of 40 and did farming. At least some of the time they did farming. I don’t think Pete, for example, farmed very long; he went to Omaha and then did other work. But Mother was afraid that they were getting along in years that something might happen and then we would be out on a limb; well, they had offered me this proposition of 80 for the price of 40, but I said I’m not interested because I didn’t want to farm at that time. Well, we were given 40 acres each on the northern quarter just east of Maria’s 80 and that’s just north of the home place.

Now I’m coming to the last topic, Dad’s greatest asset: Mom. First of all, Mom was the ticket to the farm because Grandpa Epp had made the decision that his youngest child would stay on the farm and they would live with the young couple, and so Mom, being the youngest living child, when she married Dad came to live with her, and so he got a farm out of it—not only a wife but also a farm. Mom was frugal to the point of pain. She mended and prepared hand-me-downs by the bucket full, and she always said when we went to school in overalls, for example, that were patched, she said that as long as they were clean, they were respectable. Now we as kids couldn’t quite understand that: if the clothing is patched, it is patched, and when other kids are coming to school without patched clothing, we felt a little bit insulted.

Business decisions: they were strictly for Father. Mother always said Father knows what needs to be done and how to do it. She had complete faith in her husband’s ability to take care of her. As far as activities in the community that we would call political at the present time, she was apolitical. She was not interested and didn’t ever want to vote. She said she didn’t know anything about it, so she stayed home. As far as literacy was concerned, she was very literate in German. When they finally moved in 1936, her competency in English was very limited because she had never read anything that was in English, or at least very little. Well in 1936, after having a vacation in Hawaii with Maria and Sarah, they moved to southern California, where there was a gentleman—Pete Janzen—who Dad had helped to come from Russia in the early 1920s. He convinced Dad that southern California was the place to retire, and they came home and talked about buying some orange groves and sitting under the trees, picking them and eating them. Well, they had the sale of the farm in the summer of 1936, and we took off.

Now this retirement, as far as Mom was concerned, was not all that exciting because Mother would have liked to stay on the farm with some of her children (mostly she thought of me). I had already rejected the idea of farming with Dad. Anyway, she wanted to stay by her children and grandchildren, but Dad wanted to leave. Now here’s the question: why did Dad want to leave? As far as I know, Dad had burned the bridges to Henderson because Dad never attended the church regularly. I suppose they were members of the Bethesda Church, and Mom would go quite regularly with the kids—especially when the kids were [old] enough to go and take a look at their girlfriend or boyfriend in church, but Dad went only when there was a special service such as a funeral, or I remember Dad went one time when there was a special report on some missionaries in India. From time to time we went to the MB church when they had a special program, but Dad was torn away from the Bethesda Church. Why? Well, I had a talk with my brother Pete one time when he came to Beaumont, and Pete told me about two incidents that broke the connections with the Bethesda people. One had to do with the moving of the church from the country to the town. Dad was in the group that wanted to keep it in the country, and when there is some kind of change in an organization like a church, you get the pros and the cons, and things get divided. Dad was on the wrong side, and he did not like the people that were trying to get the church to come to Henderson; some of those were business people and other members who wanted to move the church. Now the other incident had to do with the behavior of my dad. Supposedly, when he was a young buck he took a load of grain to the elevator—either to Henderson or Lushton—probably Lushton because Henderson was a little farther away, and apparently when he got off the wagon so the wagon could be weighed, one horse kept its foot on the scale, and that’s a no-no because then you get a little more weight on the wagon. And somebody—a member of the church—had seen that, and this person went to the elders to say how nasty my father had been, and of course the elders called him in. (I don’t know what they would have done.) Dad was insulted, and he thought it must have just been jealousy that made that person say that, and he never went to the elders, and so he shunned himself from the church activities. These two incidents, the incident of moving the church to Henderson and this weighing incident, were the trouble. The only person I have heard this from is my brother Pete; of course, Pete was EMB (Evangelical Mennonite Brethren), and I think sometimes it was easier for the Bethesda people to say nasty things about the EMB or the EMBs to say nasty things about the Bethesda people. I have never heard the story in my lifetime. I tried to confirm this story with Marie and Sarah, but they didn’t know or maybe they knew but didn’t want to say. I’ll leave that for you to discover.

We really didn’t get any encouragement except through Mom to go to church, and Dad didn’t care for us to go to the Bethesda Church. In California, in many ways, Mom’s adaptation to this new life was better than Dad’s because Mom learned English. She even learned to memorize English poems and English verses. She attended church there very faithfully, as did my dad. Dad shifted his membership to the Upland Mennonite Church, and how he was able to get the letter of transfer from the Bethesda Church I don’t know. As far as I know, he never paid his dues, which the ministers talked about this morning in the Bethesda Church. He never paid his fees on his 80 acres, which multiplied into much more than 80 acres, so he was really not in good standing, but that’s not something I worry about. He got his transfer.

Well, Mom learned to do a lot of things. She wove baskets out of straw, and she saw to it that somebody in the family, either Chris or Pete or the Quirings or whoever was coming, would bring some good clean straw, usually to weave baskets or mats. I still have a few baskets at home that Mom made that way. She made friends, and Dad did, too, but I think that Dad basically grieved in a sense for the farm more than Mom did after Mom got adapted to life in California.

We will return to Henry and Bea over the coming weeks, drawing both from the box of family treasures that Carolyn sent and from new resources discovered on the internet.