The semiquincentennial has passed. The fireworks are all over and the futile attempts to summarize 250 years in an hour are mostly over.
America’s 250th birthday was too big an event to capture in a post, so I didn’t try. Instead, here is my American story — a thumbnail view of the last 150 years of my own family.
We were American entrepreneurs.
We were American peasants.
Both statements are true. The three generations I know well were part of capitalist America, with all its potential for success and failure. We (my grandfather, father, and I — until I escaped to college) were also farmers, which placed us at the mercy of the weather and of market conditions.
My father, if he were alive today, would be 100 years old.
My paternal grandfather, if he were alive today, would be 152.
My age? Never mind, but the three generations of us have seen a lot of history.
Between them, my paternal grandparents had twelve children. The first died in infancy, the last was stillborn. That isn’t a bad record for a time when most diseases were incurable. The eldest surviving children were mostly married and on their own by the time the youngest arrived.
My grandfather came to Oklahoma when it was still Indian Territory. So did my grandmother. They married there in 1902; Oklahoma became a state in 1907.
Their first house was without plumbing or running water. That was typical. Like most people of that era, they were farmers. Thirty years later they survived the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, largely because they lived in the far north-eastern part of the state, on the edge of the Ozarks, which had less drought and fewer dust storms.
They lived their lives on a family farm. That is a phrase that brings a feeling of nostalgia to people who have never lived on one. It is actually an institution which survives on unpaid child labor.
When World War II began, their three youngest children — my father along with his older and younger brothers — were ripe for the draft. The eldest of the three volunteered, my father was drafted, but given a brief deferment to get in my grandfather’s crops for that year, and the youngest was drafted as soon as he was old enough.
They all returned alive. Their military stories are worth telling, but at another time.
Back from the war, my father married quickly. My parent’s first house was a converted chicken coop. Before the great expansion of suburban housing began, anything that had four walls and a roof was fair game for returning GIs. My father bought a milk truck and drove a route for the next several years, saving his money and buying dairy cows, which he housed on his brother’s farm.
Forget a city milk delivery cart, drawn by a faithful horse. Forget the stainless steel behemoths that you see on today’s roads. In those days, milk was transported in 10 gallon cans which were stored on the farm in a frigid water bath. Each milk can, with contents, weighed about a hundred pounds. They were picked up daily from each farm by milkmen who hoisted all of them manually, one by one, out of the cold tank, carried them outside to their refrigerated truck, hoisted them by hand to the high bed, then drove the the next farm. When the load was complete, they drove them to Tulsa and unloaded them, still by hand. It was a brutal business.
After four years my father sold the truck and we all moved to a house (you would call it a shack) on my uncle’s farm. It had no plumbing, just an outhouse, and our water came from a milkman like my father had been. He picked up milk from my father’s and uncle’s combined herd every day. When he unloaded his truck, he rinsed out one of the milk cans and filled it with city water. The next day it came back with the empties; we placed it on the counter in the kitchen. It provided 10 gallons a day for all uses.
No one paid for the water and no one paid the milkman for bringing it back from town. It was just a kindness among people during hard times.
After four years of living on my uncle’s farm and growing crops on rented land, we moved again, this time to our own place. It wasn’t much, and it was rented, but we worked together to fix it up. I did what I could; I was seven.
When I was eleven, I started working every day, twice a day, in the dairy barn. That continued until I was nineteen and went off to college. I also spent every day of summer driving a tractor, as well as many days in spring and fall. I once calculated that in winter I worked the farm about 35 hours a week, and in summer, closer to 50.
About the time I started working, we bought the farm from its owner, with a bank loan of course.
For about eight years, my father had my full, free labor. By the time I was fourteen I could drive a tractor as well as anyone and I competed with grown men to prove I could carry as many sacks of grain or fertilizer as they could.
That’s the way boys grow up on a farm. Childhood? I didn’t have much of one, but I didn’t feel particularly cheated. I was a man at fifteen, and that was enough.
Still, I wouldn’t do it again for a billion dollars.
I left the farm in 1966 and, for reasons having nothing to do with this post, I only returned for brief visits.
The Great American Lie is that if you work hard enough, you will succeed. My father sought success and won it, to a degree. That is the entrepreneurial part of my family story.
Things didn’t go quite as well after I left, and then his life of immense labor finally caught up with him. His health failed. He could no longer do the work it takes to run a working farm, and there was not enough income to hire someone to take his place. Or mine. He could no longer pay the bank loan.
The bank took the farm.
Bill Gates and Elon Musk notwithstanding, that is the normal end of a business, or a farm. It is especially true when the children want out.
After a life of work and sacrifice, everything is lost when a man’s strength runs out — a peasant from the middle ages would have understood the situation perfectly.
No one would doubt that Hellen Keller and Anne Sullivan were strong women,
A Writing Life 