5. The Old Barn ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

On a warm summer’s evening, Joe brought Robert along in the 1951 GMC pickup through the barnyard and through the pasture to the edge of the cornfield. Robert opened and closed the gates for his father. Joe then began using a machete to cut cornstalks, which were still green but had well-formed ears. Robert lifted the piles of cornstalks in the back of the pickup, which had the tailgate down. The Holsteins in the pasture could foresee the treat that was coming, and they gathered near the gate that the truck would pass through when it exited the cornfield. With the stalks about three feet deep, Joe climbed back behind the steering wheel, and Robert stood by the gate. Joe drove into the pasture, and the cows strode over to mill about the back of the truck. Robert jumped onto the running board, balanced his knee on the hot metal of the rear fender, steadied himself, and climbed over the short side panel into the truck bed.

“Ready?” Joe asked through the open window.

“Yep,” Robert replied.

The GMC crept forward, and Robert slid three cornstalks over the edge of the tailgate. No sooner had the corn fallen to the ground than the lead Holsteins were standing over it, finding the sweet green ears. Meanwhile, Robert shoved a few more cornstalks onto the ground in front, and cows of lesser status in the pecking order came around to take their turn to feast on the corn. The GMC kept inching along until all the corn had been shoved out. The herd would keep working on the corn until only traces of it remained.

Next, Joe and Robert drove through town to feed the Hereford herd at the Old Barn. Joe’s farm on the east side of Pine Village was really two farms joined catty-corner. The smaller farm bordered State Route 55 and could be accessed from the farm that bordered State Route 26 by driving along dusty farm lanes, through many gates, and across the corner that joined the two farms, but driving through the town meant having to pass through only two gates.

Before Joe was born, the Gady brothers ran a butcher shop just north of the intersection of the two main highways in Pine Village. Elmer Gady bought the stock and Bill Gady prepared the meat, which the Ogborns sold in their grocery. The Gadys had a large barn on their farm just south of town. Elmer always thought “big.” He shipped in western lambs that were fed in the barn, which boasted nearly 6,500 square feet under roof on the first floor alone. To accommodate more and more sheep, Elmer added wing after wing to the barn, making a large barn a huge barn. He and Bill were earning handsome profits.

Elmer decided he could afford to mortgage his farm and speculate on the Board of Trade. Elmer lost his farm and the butcher shop. He became a day laborer. Bill, meanwhile, moved to Chicago to work for a big farm, but Bill fell from a streetcar and broke his back. He returned to Pine Village. He walked stooped over. Frank Ogborn’s department store and grocery hired Bill to take orders and make deliveries.

The Old Barn, as Joe referred to it, was still standing, although it had not seen paint in so long that the boards were silvery gray, the roof rusty red.

Just outside the barn on the east side was a stock tank that once featured a windmill to pump the water. Now the pump was electric. Joe kept a long stick, which he used to push up the curled rod on the side of the switch box that started the motor. The box was affixed high on a pole, so that cattle could not accidentally start the motor by rubbing the box. The pipe that delivered the water to the tank was rusted through in several places. By covering the end of the pipe with his left hand, Robert made a water fountain through a quarter-sized hole in the top of the pipe. He drank the clear water that came from so deep down that it was icy cold.

South of Pine Village stood a large building that housed a rest home for elderly patients. Despite its size, the building was only the small remnant of what earlier generations had known as a vast spa named Mudlavia: nearly all of it long gone by the time that Robert’s family visited. Joe and Robert often stopped by Pig Gady’s room. Ernest Alvin Gady, a 1910 graduate of Pine Village High School, had acquired the nickname “Pig,” and it was just too good not to stick. Everyone knew him as Pig, and many had forgotten that his real name was Ernest. Pig was Elmer Gady’s son and had played in the Old Barn when he was a lad. For a brief time, Pig had taught lower grades, but his father’s downfall prompted him to seek independence. In 1913, when he celebrated his twentieth birthday, he decided upon the life of a transient laborer and lit out for the West.

When Robert and Joe visited him, the 74-year-old Pig wore brown plaid flannel shirts and jeans. Whenever he saw Robert, his eyes lit up.

“Say, what do you know?” Pig asked, grinning and slapping his knee. Then came the best part. Pig would lean forward and begin telling stories of his train-hopping days as an itinerant thresherman. The walls of Pig’s room in Mudlavia faded away, replaced in Robert’s imagination by the broad expanse of Kansas wheat fields and Kansas skies.

Pig was running for his life down an alley in Burlington, Kansas. He clutched a broad-brimmed straw hat in one hand and seemed to be swatting at hornets, he was sprinting so fast! He kept glancing over his shoulder, until he was sure he had lost the Industrial Workers of the World members who were chasing him. Pig slowed to a walk, his sides aching, his heart pounding. The nest that Pig had accidentally run into was not a nest of hornets but a nest of I.W.W. men, otherwise known as Wobblies. They had made vague threats to try to force Pig to join their socialist order. Pig wanted nothing to do with the I.W.W. because he would not hide shrapnel inside wheat bundles to wreck threshing machines and bring work to a halt. “Why would anybody want to bust up a separator?” Pig wondered, shaking his head in consternation. Higher wages for workers was one thing, but sabotage was another—and sabotage was criminal!

“What am I gonna do?” Pig mumbled, sauntering along. A colorful poster for the Barnum & Bailey Circus caught his eye. It was plastered to a tall fence made of rough-cut boards. With his pocketknife, Pig cut a small red rectangle from the poster. He slipped the card into the pocket of his shirt. He smiled and strode confidently along. Heading north on Third Street to find work as a thresherman, he encountered two men he thought might be Wobblies. He flashed the corner of the red rectangle and winked. One of the men produced an I.W.W. red membership card from his pocket and nodded. The Wobblies paid Pig no further notice. He strode past them and began whistling a merry tune.

Pig was fortunate enough to find employment as a spike pitcher for threshing rings in eastern Kansas. “Much of the wheat out in Kansas was winter wheat,” he told Robert. “It was spiky and tough, but it sure did grow well there.” He fondly recalled the steam engines belted to the threshing machines in the barnyards, but, in western Kansas and in states farther north, he came to know threshing on a vast scale with fields of wheat shocks stretching toward the horizon and with half a dozen columns of smoke indicating the locations of various steam engines and crews under the command of custom threshermen. Pig slept beneath the stars. He slept the sleep of a young man who has done hard work, honest work.

Pig’s stories often led back to 1913, and, in his mind, Robert was there, too, jumping down from the boxcar and looking for work. A custom thresherman, scrutinizing the hopeful unemployed men who had gathered near the train station in some Kansas town, chose Pig (and Robert) to pitch bundles. Pig (and Robert) climbed into a wagon and was hauled to where the work was to be done. Pig (and Robert) was doing what he loved best: lifting sheaves high above his head and expertly dropping them for the bundle loader perched atop the wagon.

When Joe and Robert would leave Mudlavia after visiting with Pig, Robert left with his vision expanded. Walking past the goldfish ponds of the once lavish resort, Robert peered at the flashing orange fish beneath the rippling surface that reflected the clouds. He thought of Pig flashing the red card and grinning. To Robert, the past appeared to be separated from the present only by a rippling film.

Robert thought of Pig while helping Joe load the pickup with freshly cut corn stalks for the herd of Herefords that had gathered in the pasture beside the Old Barn. Then Robert repeated the process of scattering the stalks while Joe drove the GMC slowly forward.

31. The Handwriting and the Soap ... THE FARM IN PINE VILLAGE

“Make your loop come back to the line before you swing out,” Ida said to Robert. She was making Charles and Robert practice their cursive handwriting.

The boys were sitting at the kitchen table. Ida had given them ball point pens and yellow paper with thin blue lines, and she was having them practice the letter l over and over again.

“Your father has beautiful handwriting, and I want you to have beautiful handwriting, too,” Ida reminded them. “Robert, you’re not bringing your loop all the way back to the line first.”

Robert found these exercises intensely boring. His mother would go for weeks without making him sit down for a session of cursive practice, then, for some reason, she would get the idea of forcing him and his brother to fill line after line with the same letter of the alphabet. Robert could only imagine how bored his older brother must be. Charles had already been using cursive for two years. How could he stand to sit there for an hour or more while forming the letter e endlessly?

The numbers were even worse—or so it seemed to Robert.

“Robert, you’re not closing your zeros at the top. Let me show you,” Ida would say, as she took the pen from his hand and, reaching over his shoulder, demonstrated a proper zero. “See? Make sure your loop comes all the way back again so that the top of the zero looks exactly the same as the bottom.”

Robert would take up the pen and write 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0—filling the line.

Not quite all the letters and numbers in the book were designed in quite the same way as the foot-tall white letters and numbers printed on heavy cards with dark green backgrounds that lined the tops of Mrs. Arvin’s chalkboards, but they were similar enough to meet the teacher’s demanding standards.

One sunny Saturday afternoon, when the family had returned from the boys’ piano lessons in Lafayette—and Ida’s shopping spree—Ida said to Charles and Robert, “We’re going to make soap today.”

The family did not have to make soap. Ida bought bars when she shopped. Once, she had permitted the boys to use paring knives to carve Ivory bars into the shapes of recumbent lions such as the concrete ones that lined the driveway of the occasional house. Ida had clipped the lion pattern from a magazine. When the lions were finished, she had made the boys wait to float them in the bathtub. Ida wanted to be sure that Grandma Rhode and Aunt Margaret saw the lions first, before they were rubbed into sudsy lumps.

Always the teacher, Ida had a reason for making her own soap: she wanted to show the boys how it had been done when she was a girl. She skipped the step that Grandma Rhode and Aunt Margaret would have followed of boiling hardwood ashes for half an hour in rain water, then skimming the lye off the top. Ida reached for her can of Gillett’s Lye, which she had purchased at a grocery store.

While Ida tied on her apron, she put Charles and Robert to work in the kitchen.

“Charles, how many pints are in a quart?” Ida asked.

“Two,” Charles answered.

“How many cups are in a pint?”

“Two.”

“Then how many cups are in a quart?”

“Four.”

“That’s right. Measure out four cups from this gallon of lard,” Ida said, handing Charles the tin measuring cup and a butter knife to scrape the lard level at the upper edge of the cup.

Meanwhile, Ida measured slightly less than 4 1/2 ounces of lye, which she accurately weighed on the kitchen scale. She handed Robert a Pyrex 4-cup measure and a pitcher of water from the hydrant beside the well in the front yard.

“Robert, pour the water up to the 10-ounce line here,” said Ida, pointing to the line.

Next, she carefully carried the water, the lye, and a heavy Dutch oven outside.

“Never pour the water into the lye,” Ida warned. “When I pour the lye into the water, the bowl is going to become very hot. Don’t touch anything!”

Robert and Charles kept a safe distance while Ida slowly poured the water into the Dutch oven and the lye into the water.

“We’re going to let that cool,” Ida said. “Let’s go back to the kitchen.”

Ida melted the lard over low heat on the range. Then she told the boys to remain in the kitchen while she brought in the lye and water mixture.

She set the Dutch oven on the table and handed Robert a big wooden spoon.

“You’re going to wash that spoon in this clean bowl,” Ida said, as she poured clear vinegar in the bowl. “Scrub the spoon with this Ivory soap and keep rinsing it in the vinegar until I tell you to stop.”

“You can quit rinsing now,” Ida said after a few minutes. She took the spoon from Robert and ran water over it from the faucet at the kitchen sink.

“Stand back, while I pour the lye and water into the lard,” she instructed. She slowly poured the contents of the Dutch oven into the lard that had been melted on the stove and kept hot. Lifting the wooden spoon from the towel where the spoon had been drying, she quickly began stirring the lye and water into the lard. “Watch what happens!” she said.

Robert and Charles looked on while the mixture turned into something resembling cake batter. Ida kept lifting the spoon and dribbling some of the batter across the surface. After about five minutes, the dribbled line kept its shape for a time before becoming submerged. Ida put a lid on the pot and kept it hot for an hour. Then she called the boys back into the kitchen.

They watched while she poured the mixture into a sheet cake pan.

“Now we’re ready to wait until tomorrow,” Ida said.

The next day, Ida used a sharp knife to cut the soap into large rectangular bars, which were a deep tan color from the Gillett’s Lye. One bar lasted for months and had a pure scent unlike store-bought soaps.

Joe stepped into the kitchen and admired the bars of soap.

“I think you boys deserve a treat after helping Mom make soap,” he said. “I have to go to the elevator, so you come along, and you can have a Coke.”

Charles and Robert happily climbed into the pickup, and Joe drove east on State Route 26 to the elevator.

Usually, the boys had to split one small bottle of Coke, but their father generously let each have his own bottle. Further, each could choose what kind of pop he wanted: Coke, root beer, orange, cream soda, or grape.

Joe dropped the coin into the slot at the left and opened the lid on top of the cooler. Charles went first. He wanted root beer. He took hold of the fluted cap and the bulged neck of the bottle and slid it along the slot in the metal channel that held the bottle upright. He continued to guide the bottle into the opening where he could lift it up and it was his. He inserted it into the enclosure where he could pry the cap off. Then (as he had been taught) he checked the top of the bottle to make sure the glass was not chipped. Had it been, he would have told his father, who would have told Mr. Hail, who would have given Joe a refund.

Robert wanted a grape soda, but it was blocked by bottles containing other flavors.

“Let me help,” Joe said. He slid bottles along channels and moved them out of the way like railroad cars at a switchyard until he could guide the grape bottle into the opening. He pried the cap off and handed the bottle to Robert. Finally, Joe helped himself to a Coke.

Nothing could have been better, unless Robert could have had a “black cow.” The float was made at home by combining vanilla ice cream and Coke in a tall glass. All the same, the grape soda was a delicious reward for helping his mother in the kitchen.

10. The Carnival ... THE FARM IN PINE VILLAGE

“Don’t forget that you’re taking the boys to the Carnival this evening,” Ida reminded Joe, as he prepared to spend the afternoon picking corn.

Robert had not forgotten! He could hardly wait to go!

Sponsored by the Lions Club, the Carnival was held each year in the gymnasium of the Pine Village School. It featured games and prizes, and everyone attended from miles around.

After supper that evening, the boys put on their jackets, and Joe guided them across the state highway that ran in front of their farm. The occasion was so important that school officials had placed the Coca-Cola life-size lithographed tin policeman signs at the entrances to the school. The smiling policeman in his blue uniform and white gloves held a yellow shield bearing the words SLOW SCHOOL ZONE. Joe, Charles, and Robert followed the driveway around the back, or north, side of the school and through the parking lot filled with the rounded forms of older cars and the streamlined forms of newer cars, some sporting fins over the taillights. Adults and kids of high school age milled about the doorways of the gym.

Construction of the gym had begun in 1940 and was completed in 1943 as a Works Progress Administration project. When the brick school building burned on Sunday the 21st of November in 1943, the gym had been spared.

While Robert had been inside bigger buildings, such as the Edward C. Elliott Hall of Music on the campus of nearby Purdue University—which was an enormous auditorium—he considered the gymnasium to be big enough. High above his head, dark brown rafters formed aesthetically pleasing diamond patterns across the square-based elongated-dome ceiling. The bleachers rose on three sides from concrete tiers that met in parapets sporting iron railings above ramps that sloped down to the double doorways on the southeast and southwest corners. In Robert’s imagination, the parapets, with their additional seating, arched above drawbridges, as if the gym were a medieval castle.

Outside, the autumn air was crisp, but, inside, the crowd made the atmosphere warm. Joe bought tickets for the boys to redeem at the booths. The throng of families and children was elbow to elbow within the gym, and the noise made it almost impossible to hear what anyone was saying. Robert loved the commotion! Booths manned by volunteers stood everywhere on the giant rumpled canvas that covered and protected the varnished basketball floor.

Robert’s favorite game was to go fishing. Two members of the Lions Club stood behind a metal tank made for livestock. Joe handed them a ticket, and one of the men offered Robert a dowel rod for a fishing pole. At one end of the rod was a shiny steel hook. The object was to reach into the water and hook a wooden fish that was about three quarters of an inch thick and six inches long. Each fish had a screw eye at its nose. Logic would dictate that it would be easy to snag the hook through one of the screw eyes, but, for a boy of only five years, hooking a fish was tricky. Robert held the pole almost straight up and down while he leaned against the edge of the tank. The fish, which were painted various colors, bobbed up and down. With all the patience that he could muster, Robert slowly twisted the rod until the hook seemed to line up under the screw eye just beneath the surface of the rippling water. Then he gently pulled the rod upward. Happy day! He had snagged a fish! The volunteers quickly grabbed it, so that no water would drip on the canvas.

His prize was a thin bamboo cane painted dark green. Everywhere, boys and girls who had won games were twirling similar canes. A few splintered remains of canes were underfoot.

Charles likewise won a cane.

Other booths invited contestants to toss balls at wooden targets about the same size as the fish but cut in the shape of milk bottles and painted white. At the milk bottle game, Robert and Charles won crickets, which were brightly colored tin noisemakers equipped with a rectangular piece of metal acting as a spring. By squeezing the spring to bring its end closer to the oval colored top, the owner could make a loud click–click sound. From everywhere could be heard the “click–click, click–click, click–click” of hundreds of crickets, adding to the overall din.

All evening, Joe smiled, as he met neighbor after neighbor for friendly conversation. How he could hear what the other person was saying was miraculous, given the cacophony in the gym. He was a little hard of hearing anyway. He always said that, as a child, he had developed an infection of the inner ear and that, when the doctor had lanced the eardrum to release the pressure of the infection, the result was a loss of some of Joe’s hearing in that ear. Somehow or other, he managed to understand what his friends were talking about while the crickets sang all around him and the volunteers at the booths sang out to patrons.

With a ringing in their ears, Robert and Charles went with their father across the parking lot to the one-story school that had replaced the two-story brick one that Joe had attended. Joe treated the boys to slices of pie in the cafeteria. The fluorescent lights seemed especially bright after threading their way between parked cars in the night.

Robert was sorry for the fun to have come to an end. Joe led Robert and Charles back across the street, and Ida told them it was time for them to change into their pajamas and go to bed.

“Did you win anything?” she asked the boys.

“Oh, yes!” they replied. They demonstrated how loud their crickets were. Ida knew that she would have to put up with the noisemakers for a few days, until their novelty wore off and the clicking mercifully stopped.

As Robert pulled the heavy blankets up to his chin, he turned toward the window near the foot of his bed. The panes looked out on the school driveway. The headlights of cars came to a stop before turning right or left onto State Route 26. For several minutes, Robert watched the light that swelled in the bedroom from each automobile that arrived at the intersection and that dimmed again as the car made its turn. He had had about as much fun as he could stand, so he eventually fell asleep.

7. The Winter ... THE FARM IN PINE VILLAGE

When snow deep enough to build snowmen finally arrived, Ida chose a Saturday afternoon to take the boys outside to help her roll the snow and sculpt a snowwoman with arms akimbo and head tilted. She added an apron. She tied a scarf over the head and under the chin. She stuck walnuts for blouse buttons from the waist to the neck. More walnuts made eyes and a mouth. From across the street, Beulah Jones called, “Is that you, Ida?”

“No,” the boys’ mother said. “I’d have a dust rag in one hand and a mop in the other.” Beulah laughed.

“A woman’s work is never done,” Beulah commented.

Having returned to the kitchen to get warm, Ida and her sons laid their brown gloves in a row along the top of the heating stove to dry. While dollops of snow slid sizzling from the gloves, their fingers tingled.

Later that same day, Robert and Charles went back outside and shuffled along, making trails in the snow so that they could play Fox and Goose. One trail ended in a circular area that they tramped down and that they called the goose’s nest. Robert was the goose. He waited in the nest until Charles was at the point farthest away. Robert then came out of the nest and ran along one of the trails. As the fox, Charles chose interconnecting trails to try to catch Robert, who tried to outsmart him and get back to the nest before he could be tagged. Eventually, though, Robert was tagged, and became the fox for the next round.

On January days with the thermometer dipping below zero, Joe used a butter knife to work raggedy strips of torn flannel cloth into the cracks around the doors so as to try to conserve heat from the stoves.

There were two Norge dark-brown stoves that burned heating oil. One was in the living room, and the other was in the kitchen. Both stood on squares of metal with rolled edges that were made for the purpose. The stove in the living room had a mica window on the side. Whenever Robert had a nightmare and wanted to be with his parents, he had to go from the boys’ bedroom through the corner of the living room to get to his parents’ bedroom, but Robert was afraid to pass by the stove window. In the dark, the wicked flames scared him. Sometimes, he knelt shivering for what seemed an hour before he could summon the courage to run past the window. He would shake his father’s elbow until Joe would awaken enough to reach over, pick Robert up, and put him between him and Robert’s mother. Sandwiched between his parents, Robert felt safe.

On wintry weekends, if the sun were shining on powdery snow, Jim Eberle would harness his horses to a sleigh and go riding around the school playground. Robert watched in fascination from across State Route 26. With bells jingling, the pair of light brown horses appeared to enjoy the exercise, and the riders in the sleigh obviously had a great time. Their laughter drifted across the road on the breezes that made the dust of snow twinkle in the sunshine. It was quite a picture: the red sleigh sliding along, the tan horses with a lively step, the feathery patches of snow sailing down from the pine boughs, and the bluest of blue shadows here and there.

Among Joe’s winter chores was keeping what he called the “horse tank” free of ice long enough for the cows to drink water. From the middle of the large galvanized metal tank protruded a rusty iron stove. With a poker, Joe would slide the lid open, toss lumps of coal inside, and stir up the fire before shoving the lid back in place. During the coldest stretches, even the water nearest the stove would glaze over. Joe used a hatchet to chop through the thinnest ice. The cows would nudge him out of their way so they could slurp the water with frozen chunks bobbing on the surface. The Holsteins had to stretch their necks to reach the watery circle surrounding the stove; the thick ice of the tank’s perimeter jutted up in places like a miniature version of Pine Creek.

Sometimes, to Robert’s delight, Charles would consent to pull the sled that their father had been given as a Christmas gift in 1926. Robert would ride while Charles tugged on the clothes line tied to the handle bar. Going on thirty-three years of age, the sled still pulled fairly easily when the snow was sufficiently slick. The other sled, which had been given to the boys’ grandmother in 1890 and had been built by her uncle, the blacksmith Tommy Eleazer Fenton, resisted being pulled. While there were hills for sledding near Pine Creek, Ida prohibited the boys from participating in such activity that she felt was too dangerous. When he was a boy, Joe hit his chin on the sled while dashing down a slope named “Loop the Loop.” Snow kept the cut from bleeding, but, when Joe returned home, his mother had to put gauze and a bandage on it. The boys’ father had a scar from that cut, and that was enough for the boys’ mother to warn them away from leaving the fenced yard to visit the hills along the creek.

Once, on a drive toward Rainsville, Ida pointed and yelled, “Stop the car!” Joe brought the Chevrolet to a halt. “It’s a deer!” she whispered in tones of awe. Robert and Charles looked in the direction of their mother’s hand. Standing on a bank of snow at the edge of a wood was a doe. If her ears had not twitched, she could have been described as a statue. There were no laws protecting deer. For many years, they had been hunted. Seeing one was a rare event! The family waited as long as the deer waited. The scene resembled a magnificent stage. The backdrop was the purple and tan and blue forest with snow lining the branches. In front, there arose the drift sparkling with millions of multicolored spangles. With grace and dignity, the deer watched with her soft, alert eyes. Eventually, she turned and slipped silently among the trees. “Wow!” Charles muttered.

On another occasion that winter, the boys were riding with their father in his GMC pickup. It was rated a half-ton model, but it had a ¾-ton bed. It was painted a pale silvery blue. It boasted a 1940s underdash heater that was an aftermarket installation by Glen Bisel, who had found it in a wrecked Oldsmobile car. The heater was shaped like a shield and had two doors with round metal doorknobs. When a door was opened—or even when the doors were closed—the heat poured out. Robert always sat between Joe and Charles on the bench seat. The heater was close to Robert’s knees. He compulsively drew his legs back into the seat as far from the heater as he could get.

Joe had driven north onto the true prairie that was even flatter than the land in the vicinity of Pine Village. He crossed a rail line that stretched perfectly straight in both directions and pulled onto the gravel in front of the tall elevator at Templeton.

“I thought you should see the steam engine while you still can,” Joe said to his sons, as they tumbled from the pickup.

In a building attached to one side of the towering elevator was a whispering steam engine with quietly revolving flywheel. Robert watched as the connecting rod transformed linear motion into circular motion. What seemed to Robert a massive mound of corncobs awaited use as fuel, along with coal as iridescent as ravens’ wings. Now and then a drip sizzled somewhere.

“It won’t be long before we switch over to a gasoline motor,” the engineer said to Joe.

“It won’t be half as much fun,” Joe said, smiling.

The engineer grinned and shook his head.

Joe had ensured that Charles and Robert would remember steam power. When Robert was only two, Joe had booked his family on one of the last trips of the steam locomotive named James Whitcomb Riley (after the famous Hoosier poet) from Lafayette to Indianapolis, where everyone had lunch with Joe’s father, Seymour, whom the boys always called “Grandpa Rhode.” Further, Joe was always pleased when the family car had to stop at the railroad tracks on the west side of West Lafayette to let a steam locomotive pull its train through the intersection. The occurrence happened often enough for Robert to remember the shiny black boilers and the distinctive sounds as the last of the steam locomotives chuffed through the crossing. Soon, diesels replaced the steam engines. Now Joe had gone the proverbial extra mile to have Robert and Charles witness a steam-powered elevator.

As the days grew gradually longer, Old Man Winter loosened his grip on the countryside. Icicles crashed to the ground, spots of black earth showed through melting snow, and everywhere were sounds of trickling water. Joe began to talk of plowing and disking. Robert thought how he would soon turn the ripe old age of five!