31. The Past ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

In 1956, the National Safety Council, working with automobile associations, reached agreement on a standard size of automobile license plate with mounting holes in the same places on all plates. Those plates issued in Indiana in 1955 complied with the new regulations. When Robert was in third grade, the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles began issuing plates with a one- or two-digit prefix assigned to each county alphabetically, with the large-population counties of Marion and Lake receiving additional prefixes. Robert’s home county, Warren, was 86. Letters of the alphabet after the prefixes represented further refinements in coding the locations, as in 86A or 86B.

When Robert was in the fourth grade, the postal service began recommending the use of two-letter abbreviations representing the various states, but most people continued to use “Ind.” The abbreviation “IN” was not in common use until sometime after the Zone Improvement Plan, or ZIP Codes, became mandatory for bulk mail in 1967. Robert did not like the two-letter abbreviation because he thought the way he formed his handwritten I looked confusing with his handwritten N. He resorted to printing the “IN”—which he thought looked strange when the rest of the address was written in his longhand, or cursive.

In the 1960s, dialing only numbers became the common method for using a telephone to call someone. The dialing was done, in fact, with a dial, which had holes to accept the fingertip used to spin the dial the correct length for each number. To accommodate more than one party on the same line, the ring pattern indicated which house was being called; for example, with two parties, the phone would ring with long rings in rhythmic succession to indicate one home and with two short rings followed by slight pauses to indicate the other home.

By the early 1970s, men’s hair had become long. In the early 1960s, the Beatles had begun to change attitudes about men’s haircuts, but it was not until 1971 and 1972 that the hairstyles of men in such rural communities as Pine Village had made the full transition into long hair. In the decade after Robert graduated from high school, the caboose would vanish from the train while the pump would switch to self-serve gasoline. 

Such changes as license plate sizes, license plate numbering, state abbreviations, ZIP Codes, dialing phone numbers, and men’s hairstyles were noticeable. Other changes were less so.

In the 1930s, metallic oxides, such as rust, were used by paint manufacturers to make a cheap—but poor quality—paint for barns and outbuildings. When Robert was small, several barns in rural Indiana were painted cheaply, and the color was nearly a dark orange with much of the wood grain showing through, as if the building were stained, rather than painted. Joe referred to the orange hue as “turkey blood” because, when the earliest painting of barns occurred, some milk-based paints had been mixed with blood to form a red color. Throughout the years that Robert was in the Pine Village School, fewer and fewer barns were coated with the rusty orange paint.

In 1900, when the U.S. population was a fraction of what it would become, more than twenty million gallons of sorghum were produced. Sorghum is a cereal grain that is harvested for human consumption in some parts of the world. Benjamin Franklin wrote about using sorghum straw for brooms, but not until a century later was sorghum widely cultivated in the U.S. The Fourteenth Annual Report of the Ohio State Board of Agriculture (1859, published in 1860) announced that the state fair had witnessed “many samples of syrup of the Sorgho, or Chinese Sugar Cane.” As late nineteenth-century homes had gallon containers of sorghum syrup (a.k.a. sorghum molasses) to pour on buckwheat pancakes, to sweeten baked beans, to make cookies, and to flavor bread, there was widespread interest in techniques for boiling the juice from the crushed sorghum stalks to transform into syrup. According to the Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1867, 6,698,181 gallons of sorghum molasses were recorded in the census for 1860. Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri were responsible for approximately half the total production in 1867. When Robert was small, fields of sorghum were not uncommon. By the time he was in high school, sorghum had virtually vanished. During his years in the Pine Village School, more and more farm families quit using molasses. Syrups were readily available in grocery stores.

Molasses could be added to livestock feed; for example, Joe often asked the Pine Village Feed Store to add molasses to the ground feed that he purchased to serve his Holsteins on Christmas Day. Joe wanted his cows to have a special treat. Ground feed was usually a light sandy color; the molasses feed looked like light brown sugar. Over the course of Robert’s childhood, farms were gradually becoming larger and less diversified; accordingly, fewer farms raised livestock. Incrementally, livestock fences were torn down, and fields of corn and soybeans were planted right up to the roadside ditches. Molasses and fields of sorghum became relics of the past.

Little by little, the old ways were disappearing. Joe told Robert that Don Akers and he had once put a floor in a bridge over the dredge ditch on the Thomason place. Three trees, fourteen inches in diameter, served as beams, and planks were laid at right angles over the trees. “It was almost dark by the time we got those last planks in place,” Joe said. He and Don dipped 60-penny nails in a can of grease and pounded them down. A new moon came up. “If the old-timers are right,” Joe said to Don, “the nails will pop up.” ... and, sure enough, every month, the nails kept working up, according to Joe. Such a notion—even one unsupported by scientific inquiry—was a thing to be appreciated, as it contributed to the spice of life, if nothing else.

There were jobs to be done during a new moon, when the light of the moon was absent from the sky at night, and jobs to be done during a waxing moon. Activities for the new moon included planting root crops, such as potatoes, and making sauerkraut. Those for the waxing moon included planting vegetables that are harvested above ground and butchering hogs. Pork produced during a new moon would shrink and turn tough when cooked.

Ida warned Robert never to thank anyone for a plant because doing so would cause the plant to wither away and perish. A common occurrence in the spring and fall was the trading of plants among rural women. Mrs. Bowen would pull into the driveway, open the trunk of her car, and haul out a bucket full of daisies in the springtime or a bucket full of iris tubers in the late autumn. “I thought you’d want some of these,” she would say to Ida, and Ida would stop whatever she had been doing and would gleefully take the time to choose a location and to plant the contents of the bucket—while sharing the latest news with Mrs. Bowen. In turn, Ida would dig peonies or poppies or crown imperials to take to Mrs. Bowen, as well as other women in the community, and no one ever said so much as a “thank you.” Such superstitions lent charm to living. While some superstitions persisted, many others gradually disappeared.