The question posed to me was, “How did growing up in the 1950s help shape the person you became later in life?” The ladies who asked it grew up in the ’50s as the Pfeiffer sisters and wrote a book,“While the Windmill Watched,” about their experiences.
I was born in 1947. The ’50s were my formative years – a boy growing up on a 640-acre diversified farm. I was influenced by my parents, obviously, and their primary values – church and family (a large extended family with many cousins).
I was shaped by my environment – the farm. When I was asked about growing up in the 1950s, my response was something about chores and the responsibility you learn early in life if you have livestock. It didn’t matter if it was 100 degrees above or 30 below, the cows had to be milked, eggs gathered and pigs fed. Holidays and birthdays, it didn’t matter. But growing up on the farm wasn’t all work. I was shaped by the creek and the trapline, too.
One learns certain values if your farm is largely self-sufficient, like ours in the ’50s. We raised oats and barley and hay to feed the livestock. There wasn’t a lot of income from cash grains. In fact, Dad’s records show in one year in the 1950s, the income from selling cream was greater than the income from selling wheat.
I think of the satisfaction my father must have felt at the end of the year – satisfaction about what he, his wife and children had been able to accomplish working side by side. The barn was filled to the rafters with square bales to feed the milk cows all winter. The hay yard had stacks of bales for the beef cows. The granary was filled with oats and barley to grind on Saturday mornings to feed the cattle, pigs and chickens. One bin in the granary held enough wheat for seed for the next year. In the basement of the house, where pigs and chickens had been butchered and lard rendered, were shelves full of canned meat, fruit and vegetables. They were there because of a large garden and lots of work by the entire family.
All of those things helped shape me. And, like my dad, I still feel some end-of-the-year satisfaction.
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Al Gustin is a retired farm broadcaster, active rancher and a member of Mor-Gran-Sou Electric Cooperative.
