29. The Sow and the Drive-In ... THE FARM IN PINE VILLAGE

Early that spring, sows were farrowing, and Joe had one sow left over after filling all his individual hog houses. He arranged panels wired to metal fence posts to form a narrow chute to help guide the sow from the hog lot to the stall in the southwest corner of the barn. Unbeknownst to Joe, Robert was hiding near the chicken house. Robert held a corn cob that he planned to throw at his father in an ambush whenever Joe might walk within range. Joe often entered into the fun of such mock attacks, and Robert looked forward to the surprise.

Meanwhile, Joe was ready to steer the sow toward the barn. He stood behind her, and he took hold of the top edges of the panels to steady himself, should the sow try to back up. He began nudging her forward.

“Go on! Get on up there!” he spoke sharply to the rather reluctant sow. Just as the hog had reached the high threshold of the open Dutch door, she balked.

“Come on! Get up in there!” Joe shouted.

Suddenly, the sow flexed her fat body, bringing her front legs around to her left and placing them on the edge of the panel, as if she would attempt to jump over the panel.

“Pshaw!” Joe exclaimed, as he struggled to shove her legs off the board.

No sooner had he dislodged the sow than she whirled to her right and tried to leap over the tall panel.

“Dog my cats!” Joe yelled while making a superhuman effort to shove her front legs back down to the ground. In the process, he scratched his forearm on the end of a baling wire, and blood trickled down to his elbow.

Robert watched, wondering if he could do anything to assist his father.

Joe managed to get the sow oriented in the right direction, and, with a mighty push, he made her jump up over the tall threshold and into the stall. Working at breakneck speed, Joe swung shut the bottom half of the Dutch door and locked it in place. He breathed a sigh of relief and climbed over a panel to tend to matters outside the chute.

All at once, with a splintering crash, the sow flew through the air and fell to the ground. She found her legs and bolted for the hog lot. The remains of the broken Dutch door hung from the hinges.

Joe uttered a word that Joe never said.

Robert remained hidden. Robert’s eyes were wide. He knew the word because some of his classmates at school had kindly taught him what it meant, but he never expected to hear his father use it. His father never used a naughty word!

Robert slunk away, so that Joe would never know that his son had overheard his father’s transgression. Robert would keep the secret for years to come, and he never divulged it to anyone. Robert felt certain that his father, who taught the adult class at the church on Sundays, had instantly repented!

The sow that had escaped the barn held off having her litter. Joe felt that the litter by the first sow to have had pigs in the present round was old enough to be released into the hog lot, and he readily confined the stubborn sow in the hog house vacated by the oldest piglets and their mother.

To trim down the number of pigs on the farm, Joe later loaded three pigs in his GMC pickup. He could haul them to a variety of nearby markets: Boswell, Attica, and Lafayette were the principal outlets. On that Saturday, he chose Lafayette. Charles and Robert accompanied him. After unloading the pigs at the stockyard, the morning had been spent. Joe and the boys were hungry, so Joe pulled into the Park ’n’ Eat, a drive-in restaurant on State Street with the Tastee-Freeze and the Cities Service station on the east side and the Standard gasoline station on the west side.

When the waitress stepped up to the truck, she made a face. “Pew!” she said in disgust, as she smelled the hog manure in straw lying in the bed of the pickup. Without saying another word, she turned and went back to the dining area.

“I wonder what the hold-up is,” Joe said.

Before long, the owner of the restaurant walked out to the truck. With an apologetic smile, he said to Joe, “I’m sorry. I’m afraid we can’t serve you. The smell of the pigs is too strong and will scare away our other customers.”

Robert felt embarrassed. He understood the owner’s point, but Robert knew better than to say anything.

With a sharp look in his eye, Joe returned the owner’s smile and said, “That’s the fragrance of money. I just sold three pigs, and I have good American money to spend on three of your hamburgers.”

The owner shrugged his shoulders and enhanced the apologetic look on his smiling face. “I’m terribly sorry, but I’m afraid I have to ask you to drive on. If you will come back in your family car, I will personally ensure that your meal meets your expectations.”

“You needn’t go to such trouble,” Joe replied over his shoulder, as he backed out from under the roof of the drive-in and headed home.

“I’m sorry you boys have to wait a while longer before we eat,” he said. Robert and Charles didn’t mind, but they could see that Joe was seething.

It came as no surprise that the family never returned to the Park ’n’ Eat.

The occasion when the sow broke the barn door and the occasion when the restaurant refused service were the only two occasions when Joe was angry—at least, they were the only two times when Robert could detect Joe’s anger. Joe was otherwise consistently peaceful, even amicable at all times! Robert concluded that pigs were the ingredients to upset his father’s proverbial apple cart. After all, hogs were the common denominator in both incidents. Robert developed the misgiving that, in working with swine, situations could arise that would inspire ire; for that reason, he always tried to keep his equanimity and his sense of humor when feeding pigs or helping care for new litters. Robert had reached the conclusion that pigs were catalysts for disaster.      

14. The Birthday ... THE FARM IN PINE VILLAGE

During the year before Robert began his formal schooling, his father bought a used car that was almost new. It was a 1957 two-door Chevrolet Bel Air Hardtop Coupe. Robert was glad to see the 1950 Chevrolet go. After all, it had knocked out his two front baby teeth! The new car sported fins and futuristic hood ornaments reminiscent of rockets. The roof was white and the body was pink. The abundance of chrome made Robert blink on a sunny day! What a splendid show the automobile made at the drive-in movies and drive-in restaurants!

Toward evening on Robert’s sixth birthday, the family drove to Boswell, a nearby town, for so-called “ice cream cones” at the Tastee Treet. The late July temperature of 84 degrees Fahrenheit felt a little on the hot side, and frozen custard was the perfect remedy. Robert was permitted to have the largest size. The challenge was twofold: to consume the swirled goodness without getting a so-called “ice cream headache” and to do so before the bottom of the cone became so soggy as to leak and drip down Robert’s shirt.

While Joe, Ida, Charles, and Robert were enjoying their cones, the topic of hair color came up in conversation. Everyone had dark hair, except Robert, who was blond. “I suppose Robert got his blond hair from you,” Ida said to Joe.

“Dad has dark hair,” Robert said, not really meaning to sound so contradictory.

“He does,” Ida agreed, “but it was blond when he was your age. It turned dark later.”

Actually, Joe was bald on top: a fact that embarrassed him. He liked wearing caps, which the seed corn companies provided, because they covered the bald area. The fringe of dark hair around the edges of the cap made him appear to have no baldness.

“I was somewhat younger than Robert when my hair grew darker,” Joe said.

Meditatively, Robert licked the frozen custard. He hoped his hair would remain blond.

At that moment, a man of high school age strode into the filling station that stood next door to the Tastee Treet. The young fellow’s hair was light blond.

“My hair is never going to turn black,” Robert asserted. “It is going to be that color.” He pointed at the blond high schooler through the open window of the car.

Even though she was laughing, Ida said, “It’s not polite to point.”

Robert’s prediction was accurate. Years later, he often pondered if, on that day at the Tastee Treet, he had willed himself to retain his blond hair.

Back home that evening, Robert asked his mother if he could practice reading The Little Engine That Could. She readily consented. Until September, there would be no new programs on the TV, and, in those years, Ida would not let the Zenith dictate what the family spent its time doing. There were only three major networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC), and by 1960, they had become chock full of Westerns, which were becoming just alike. The Zenith with its remote-controlled antenna on a scaffold up the side of the house pulled in two stations well and a third station reasonably well, but, as there was nothing that Ida wanted to see at that hour on the clear stations (that is, those free of static), she sat down beside Robert on the davenport in the kitchen. Together, they held the book that was so red that the blue locomotive on its cover almost blended into the red. It was the version retold by Watty Piper and published by Platt & Munk.

Robert sounded out the words again: “THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD … Chug, chug, chug. Puff, puff, puff. Ding-dong, ding-dong. The little train rumbled over the tracks. She was a happy little train for she had such a jolly load to carry. Her cars were filled full of good things for boys and girls.” Robert felt that he might be a little too old for the story, but he was learning to read and had to begin somewhere. As he had witnessed steam engines in action, he was ready to read about the confident little engine in the story.

Ida was a little worried that Robert might be starting to read too soon, but she remembered what the speech impediment specialist had said about Robert’s wide vocabulary. She did not want to hold Robert back. He would just be ahead in reading, and that was how it would be.

Robert read each word slowly for a page but was stuck on “giraffes” for a long time. “Yellow” threw him, as did “bobbed.” When he bogged down on “aeroplanes,” Ida said that he had read enough for one day, and Robert wanted to stop anyway. He glanced out the open window at the White Pekin ducks in the lot beyond the wire fence that ran along the south side of the yard. They were dabbling their bills in their water tub and preening themselves.

“It’s time to help your father feed those ducks and do the chores,” Ida said.

Having birthdays did not give one a pass to avoid chores on the farm! Besides, Joe was sure to be in a pleasant mood. He always was! He probably would join in a game of cowboys.

While the chores of feeding the chickens, feeding the ducks, feeding the geese, feeding the turkeys, making sure the pigs had enough feed in their feeders, feeding the Herefords (the beef cattle), and feeding and milking the Holsteins were underway, Robert and Charles could hide briefly and, when Joe passed nearby, leap out of hiding and “fire” an imaginary gun by tossing a corn cob shorn of its kernels. Joe would duck or sidestep the “bullet” that the cob represented. He carried a similar cob in a pocket of his overalls, and he would spin and “fire” his cob at whichever “cowboy” had “shot” at him. Whenever they were hit by one of Joe’s cobs, Charles or Robert would groan, “Oh, he got me,” hold hands over the spot where the cob had so lightly struck, and slowly fall to the ground. Then it was back to work.

The summer days seemed delightfully long. At the conclusion of his birthday, Robert felt he was living in an ideal world with the ideal car, the ideal ice cream cone, the ideal books, the ideal family, and the ideal hair color! 

Patents of Pine Village, Rainsville, and Independence, Indiana 4

In 1871—just three days after his birthday—David B. Eberly of Pine Village, Indiana, received a patent for an improvement in cultivators. Born in Pennsylvania on the 7th of October in 1815, Eberly worked as a blacksmith in Boswell, Indiana, for a time (as indicated in the census of 1880). According to Eberly’s description, his invention had at least two significant features: “First, … a double-pointed shovel provided with a spring-cap secured at one side by rivets and at the other by a screw-bolt to the back of the double-pointed shovel in such a manner that the shovel may be adjusted on the shank, set, and secured at any desired angle. Secondly, … a curved angular shank provided with a slot in its upper end, secured to the plow-frame by two screw-bolts, one near the vertex of the angle of the shank, the other in the slot aforesaid, the whole being so arranged that the shank will keep the shovel in position when used in arable soil, but will permit it to yield when it meets an obstruction.”

Patent for Improvement in Cultivators

By David B. Eberly of Pine Village, Indiana (1871)

Essentially, everything about Eberly’s cultivator was adjustable from the spacing of the shovels, through their angle, to the position of the shank. His was a so-called “walking cultivator.” By looping the lines around one shoulder, he could twist his torso to signal the team of horses while he held onto the handles of the cultivator.

Abraham Haun and Alonzo P. Rowen served as witnesses to Eberly’s patent.

As Eberly’s patent was granted prior to 1880, a scale model of his invention had to accompany his application. This fact suggests that his cultivator was substantially more than a dream on paper. The evidence that Eberly was a blacksmith leads to the conclusion that he built at least one full-size cultivator.

My review of books depicting and describing farm implements revealed no cultivators quite like Eberly’s invention. I wonder if any company availed itself of the opportunity to copy his ideas or if he sold any cultivators himself.

Eberly died on the 18th of February in 1901. He is buried in Pine Village Cemetery.