CHARLIE THE FARMER
My dad, Charles Sterling, preferred to tell stories instead of writing
them. He could tell stories about his life for hours. His memory was
good even into his latter years. The following is one example of his
stories.
This story was taken from a tape made by Charles Winfield Sterling telling life-story on July 27, 1970 when he and Esther lived at Spring Branch, TX. Schulenburg, TX. Probably typed by Dorothy Cavanaugh.
This is the prologue to the story of Charlie the Farmer. I spent most of my school years in a little one room school, Mission Center, Kansas. Every Monday we had memory exams. One of the first ones was ‘Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime and departing leave behind us footprints on the sands of time'..... (there is a blank place in the tape)...common old farmer might have left a few tracks of his own. I can't ever remember wanting to be a ruler of men or have great riches. All I ever wanted was a ranch with a few cattle. I can't seem to find any legitimate excuse for being like I am. I was born in a good home. I think my father was the best man I ever knew, my mother the best mother and nothing much the matter with the rest of the family. I married the only woman I ever wanted and she mostly let me do as I pleased. She tried to change me at first some but soon gave up on me or maybe what little bit there is in me is there on account of her work. Most anything can change a man some in 41 years. I know it would help some if I could say I wasn't in very good health or couldn't learn anything, but just to be honest, there is just no excuse that I can think of except I am just me.
I guess I must have had "farmer" painted on my forehead when I was born because I never wanted or intended to be anything else. My wife can paint a picture, sing and play the piano or organ but me, all I can do is farm. To a farmer, the most beautiful thing in the world is to take a tough, rough piece of land and turn it into a nice smooth seed bed then watch the little plants grow. The beauty and the wonder of it cannot be equaled in anything, except the birth of living things. I am now 70 years old. I have had things happen that seemed pretty rough at the time but as I look back on them now, they amuse me and the hurt of them is completely gone. The good things, and there have been many, are something to remember. I hope my children and perhaps my grandchildren, when they get older, may enjoy this yarn. I may polish it just a little or call it lapse of memory or stretch of imagination but anyhow, hope some of you enjoy the story of Charlie the Farmer.
I was born in Dayton, Kansas, December 24, 1899. Having spent a good many winters in Kansas, I am sure most of them had pretty cold nights and probably the doc had to stay there a long time and wait and maybe he was a little bad tempered by the time I came along.
I remember my mother telling me one time that I was a beautiful baby but it seems hard for me to believe because the first time I ever remember seeing a picture of me I was a little bitty skinny guy with bright red hair and many freckles. I had a little limbered tongue or some kind of impediment of speech or something that kept me from learning to talk very soon. My Uncle Wait and my older brother Chet had a lot of stories they used to tell about the way I talked. I don't know whether they are true or not because both these guys were pretty good story-tellers. Augusta had a little trouble learning to talk too except that she could talk just as plain as anybody but she tried to talk just like I did. Uncle Wait told this story on me. He asked me "Who taught you to talk?" and I says "I taught myself to talk" and he says "Well then, who taught Augusta to talk?" and I said "Well, I taught her to taught and if I hadn't taught her to taught she wouldn't be a taughtin' yet." (Esther laughs in the background.) One time I remember when I was a pretty small boy, or I think I remember, I was over at Uncle Wait's and come a rain and rained pretty hard and I cried to go home. I was homesick. Uncle Wait went and got his rain coat and his rubber boots and he said "Well, I'm gonna go hitch up the horses to take you home so just lay down here on the couch and make yourself comfortable and I'll come get you when I get through hitching up the team." The next thing I remembered was the sun shining in the window. I said, "Well, this is mighty fine. I can stay again some night." Uncle Wait had a lot of other silly stories about me and the cow and what not that I've forgotten. Chet had one or two, I can remember, so there is some truth in his.
One time it was a pretty cold day and Chet had to go haul some corn fodder to the cows. There was snow on the ground so he fixed me all up to go along. We went out to get the corn. He had a shotgun and I remember he shot a jackrabbit. The gun was too close to my head and it almost sounded like it broke my ear drums. It was real cold and after a while, according to Chet, why he looked up at me the tears was running down my face and freezing on my collar of my coat. He asked me what was the matter and I said "Well, I'se a feezing." So he took me to the house to warm me up.
Then one time I wasn't feeling very good and Chet went out and he shot a great big jack rabbit. He thought to cheer me up he'd bring it in and show me that jack rabbit. It seems to me like that thing was big enough that as high as he could hold it, its ears still reached clear down to the floor. He said, "What do you think of that Charlie? Ain't that some rabbit?" and I said, "Is that a wabbit I thought it was a coon."
We had a farm at Carlton, Kansas. The first place that 1 can remember. It was a kind of a rolling hill farm with a little creek running through the middle of it. All my life I thought it was the most perfect place for a boy to grow up that any boy ever had a chance to have. I remember, to the west of the house, we had a little patch of alfalfa down in the bend of the creek. In the spring jackrabbits use to come down off the hill, just hundreds of them, and they'd graze all in this alfalfa. So one day my daddy went to Abilene and when he came back he had a blue greyhound. Shortly after he brought her home, she had a litter of pups. So, we had about six greyhound pups and their mamma and they lived off these jackrabbits.
Then one time I went to Hope, Kansas to get some work done on my teeth and we went to a friend's place to visit, my mother and I. This boy had a little spotted bird dog pup and he said "Charlie, how would you like to have this pup? I'll give him to you." I said, "Well, we got a bunch of hounds and a couple of rat terriers and a shepherd dog at home and doubt Ma would let me take him home." He said, "Well, he's a pretty quiet dog. We'll just put him in a sack and put him under the back seat of the surrey and maybe your mamma won't know he's there." So, we took him and put him in a sack and bundled him up pretty good and put him under the back seat of the surrey. When Ma and me was going home why every once in a while I'd hear him scratching around back there. I noticed Mamma listening once in a while but she didn't say anything. When we got home, I waited till everybody was pretty quiet and I went out and got him out of the surrey and turned him out of the sack. The next morning everybody was quite surprised to see a bird dog in the yard. I took this old dog when he got grown and took him out to the hounds one day to chase jack rabbits. We hadn't gone very far till the hounds took after a jack rabbit run clear out of the country. This old bird dog didn't go with them so pretty soon I jumped up another jack rabbit and he took after him a ways. The jack rabbit would run a little ways then he would stop and every time the jack rabbit stopped why this dog would stop and point him. I had this dog a good many years but I never got him to where he'd run a jack rabbit only just to where the jack rabbit would stop and then he would stop and point him.
We had a shepherd dog that we called Shep and he was a good cow dog. He'd go bring the milk cows in at night and he was pretty good. He'd never run them but if anything went where he didn't want it to why he'd go grab it by the tail. He'd swing around on its tail and make them go where he wanted. One time he got in a fight with a badger and it cut his front paw pretty bad and it never did heal up very good and most of the time he ran on three legs but it never seemed to slow him down very much.
The first horse I had we called Ned. He was a grey horse and a pretty good saddle horse but we never could get him to work on the buggy. We didn't keep him very long cuz every horse we had, we had to be able to ride or drive the buggy too. The next team we had we called Pep and Maude. We could drive them with the buggy or ride them or anything.
In the first days when I was pretty young, they use to ship lots of cattle from Texas up to our part of the country. South of us there were lots of big pastures where they put these cattle. In the summer then, they'd drive the cattle to Carlton and sell the calves from the cows. Then drive the cows back to pasture. There'd be a week or so when the cows would keep the fence tore down all the time. We'd see them goin' back and forth down the road, just ballin' all the time. One day I was over in the pasture and there was a milk cow with a little spotted calf. I figured that he'd belong to me if I could catch him so I got the cows all rounded up and drove them into the corral and finally got this calf in the barn and I told Dad that I had me a calf. He said, "Well, I'm sorry that calf doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the man that owns the cows." I remember that was about the most heart breaking thing that had happened to me up until then.
I had a little patch of land north of the house, just where the ravine had left a pile of dirt. Dad told me one time that I could have that for a garden. I planted that little patch in corn. The first crop I ever had. One night we had a hard rain and the water came down that ravine and washed all of my corn over and bent it all over. The next day I went down and set every stalk up and built a pile of dirt around it. It had to stay that way. I don't remember if it made a corn crop or not but I remember I had lots of fun doing it.
When I was about six years old, my daddy taught me to drive a team of horses. We had a big old team of horses that we called Sorrel and Blacky. Dad used to take and hitch them to the harrow and put me on the harrow. I'd go harrow corn. I don't know how big these horses were but it seemed to me like they were tremendously big.
I first went to school at Carlton, Kansas, in a little old board shack of a school house, down on the corner of Uncle Wait's place. It had about enough seats in it for maybe fifteen or twenty kids. It was all double seats in it. The first morning I went to school, why I was a little late getting to school. When I went in the school room, why my cousin Tom was sitting in the farthest back seat and he motioned me to come sit with him. So I went there and sit with Tom. Just as soon as I got there he started making funny faces and whispering funny stuff to me. I got so tickled that I couldn't do anything but laugh and the next thing I remember, I was sitting up on the front seat. So I spent the first year of school sitting right in front of the teacher's desk. We had about two miles and a half to walk to school. The other neighbor kids, I think there was about four others besides us, walked about the same distance. We had two pretty good size girls that walked to school with us and they used to chase me around and kiss me just because it made me cry, I guess. I went to school there two years. Then the third year I started to school there why my sisters and Chet were going to school in Manhattan, Kansas. My sister Alma got sick and Mother went down there to see her. While she was gone, Dad just decided that he would sell that old farm and go down to Manhattan, Kansas and buy a farm so we would be closer to where there were good schools for the kids to go to. So, Dad sold the farm and when Mama came back from Manhattan, Kansas why we had a sale and sold everything.
The year that I was 9 years old I was in Manhattan. I never had been in a town before I went to Manhattan and I didn't know that town kids were different from country kids. For some reason or other these town kids felt awful sorry for me. I didn't know how to play marbles, I didn't know how to do much anything they could do. Dad moved Pep and Maude to Manhattan with us and so I used to get one of them and I'd ride around on one of them. The other kids got to where they'd throw rocks at me when they'd see me riding. I got to fighting them a little. Things just seemed to go from bad to worse. Nothing worked for me. I went to school one day and another thing I guess maybe in Manhattan they'd never seen a kid with red hair and freckles, cuz all they did was yell at me "Red head, red head, gingered red head" and point their fingers at me. I found out there was more of them than there was of me and about the only thing I could do about it was to get me a rock or something that would kind of equal me up with them.
I went in to the school class one day -- in those days we had a great big, old, heavy geography book - and mine was laying on top of my desk. I'd just started to sit down at my desk and the guy in front of me started saying under his breath, something about a country hick with.gingered red head. I reached over and whammed him with that geography book and bloodied his nose on the desk. I got sent to the principal's office. I'd heard them tell terrible tales about what the principal would do to guys that got sent to the office, so I figured he was going to beat me about half to death. I sat there in his office. He didn't pay any attention to me just like I was a bump on a log. I just sat there and sat there and sat there and he kept a fiddlin' around and looking at his books and stuff. Finally, he noticed I was sittin' there and he said, "You don't seem to get along here very good. Do you?" and I kinda mumbled, "No, I guess not."
He said, "What kind of a place did you come from?" So I told him all about what a wonderful place I'd lived out at Carlton, Kansas where everything was just right and there wasn't a lot of kids to holler around at me and so forth. He got me to talkin' and I did a lot of talkin' to him and he said, "Well, I tell you, these kids in here aren't as bad as you think they are and maybe some day you will learn to get along with them. Do you want to try?" and I said, "Well, I guess so." He said, "Well, okay you go back to class and don't hit anybody." So I went back to class and I don't know whether I could ever learn to get along with those kids or not because that was the last day I went to school in Manhattan.
The next day, Augusta took down with the measles so we got put in quarantine. While we was in quarantine, why my daddy went to Topeka, Kansas and bought a farm down there. So, while I still had the measles, why, Dad loaded up everything we had and drove to Topeka, Kansas with it. Mother and I and Marion had to stay behind until we got over the measles and we stayed at a place that had two little girls about my age that were the most loving things that ever lived. I remember they gave me a pretty rough time. One afternoon I figured I'd had just about all I could take and I decided I'd just leave the country. It was snowing pretty good and Ma couldn't see me leave so I took off up the streets of Manhattan. After a while, I commenced getting pretty cold and the snow was coming down pretty hard and I knew I was lost. I was just about getting ready to start going some place else when I happened to meet Chet coming home from school and he took me back home.
In the early Spring of 1909, my mother, Marion and I left Manhattan, Kansas and headed for Topeka. I think that is the only place that I ever left in my life that I left with absolutely no regret. I was really glad to leave. We took a train from Manhattan to Topeka and it seemed to me like that train went faster than anything could possibly travel. I thought the telegraph poles went by so fast that it seemed like I couldn't see the scenery for the poles going by. For a boy that had never been faster than a pony could run, why, I expect it was pretty fast. We got to Topeka in the afternoon and Alma and Stella met us at the railroad station with the team and surrey. I was a little disappointed when I first got off the train. It seemed like there was just as many people in Topeka as there had been in Manhattan and I started worrying right away. In a little while, well, Stella said "Here we are on 21st Street and from here on home it's a straight road." In a little bit the houses started getting thinner and thinner and we were back out in the country and we went up over a pretty good sized little hill and back down into the ravine. Stella said, "Up there on the side of that hill is our house." It was partly a two-story house. The part that was the living room and kitchen was just one story and the living room had three big windows kind of in a semi circle on the east side of it that Mother used to use kind of as a green-house. The snow was about half melted off the yard and where the snow was melted off the yard was real bright green with blue grass. I took one look and I made up my mind right quick -- that was the place for me.
Mission Center was our school district and it was a little place. All the kids that went there could walk to school. I think probably the farthest from the school was possibly three miles, maybe a little farther. Most everybody walked to school or rode a pony when the weather was bad or sometimes drove a buggy. Across from the school was a Grange Hall that was the community center. This Grange Hall was used for everything from church, Sunday school, dances, Grange meetings, anything the community wanted to have was put on in the second story of this Grange Hall. Mission Center was a community that there is nothing like it anymore. Every man in Mission Center community prided himself on his word being just as good as his bond. I heard my neighbor talking to my dad one time and they were talking about the man that lived outside of the community. He traded horses some and there had been word around that maybe some of these horse deals had been a little sharp, anyhow. Dad said, "Well, I don't think Mr. Jim would lie about a horse but it is possible that he might know a lot of things about him that he wouldn't tell you." So that made him pretty much kind of a crook. That was a terrible place for a boy to get the kind of training that I needed for the kind of a world that I lived in most of my life. Uncle Lee Barry used to tell a story about an old Jew that stood his baby son on the piano and then held out his arms to him and said jump and when he jumped he jerked his arms back and the boy hit the floor, ka bang. The old man backed off and said, "There, I guess that will teach you not to trust nobody." That's more the kind of training that I guess I needed when I was a boy but that I'm very I glad that I didn't get. I think that maybe a person looks back and thinks, well, those were the good old days but I enjoyed my life at Mission Center very much. Our school was a little behind a hill and when we walked to school we had about a quarter of a mile of woods to go through and over a little creek and it was a good place to kind of loiter along when the days were nice and the birds were singing and the sun was shining and may have made me late to school once in a while. It seems like a sad thing that a place like that is gone forever. Because now, places where I used to herd the cattle and make hay and so forth in the summer time, there is a golf course on part of it and the rest of it is a city.
These years when I first went to Mission Center was about the time that people commenced getting machinery conscious. There was beginning to be a few cars and a truck once in a while and they were not many years why they commenced having a gasoline engine. Things were just starting to get kind of mechanical-minded along the years when I was at Mission Center. When we had been there about two or three years, Chet and my brother in law Perry Tice rented some land west of our place about five miles, out at Mission Creek. They went to farming out there together. Neither one of them was married yet. I worked for them one summer. I don't remember just exactly what kind of a deal I had on the thing because they didn't pay me anything. I don't know whether they paid Daddy anything for my services or not but I don't think so. So, I probably wasn't the best of hands but by them prodding me a little they got a good deal of work out of me anyhow. I used to get up in the mornings and help Dad milk the cows and then I'd either saddle up old Pep or hitch her to the buggy and drive five miles out to Mission Creek. Then I'd hitch her onto a one row planter that they had. They had four horses and they'd put them on a middle buster and bust out a furrow. I'd take this one row planter and hitch old Pep to it and I planted their corn. I'd go barefoot walking along behind that planter. They'd always get a head start on me in the morning. They expected me, since the planter didn't pull very hard, to catch up before night. I didn't mind the work but Mission Creek always had pretty good fish in it in those years and it was a petty hard deal keeping your mind on planting corn when you knew that just down there about a hundred yards there was an old catfish just raring to bite your hook. There was some folks that owned the place they rented named Corbitt and east of Corbitt's house there was a spring that came right out of the side of the hill and ran about a two inch stream of water all the time that was just as cold as ice. They had a spring house where the spring was and they had some shallow troughs where the water run into them and water ran on out. They kept milk and butter and cheese and stuff set in that cold water. There was a stile over the fence and where the water came out of the spring house there was a nail in the side of the spring house with a tin cup on it. Everybody came along the road when they were thirsty and hot why they would climb over that stile and go down there and get a drink of that good spring water. Corbitts were pretty good to me and they knew a growing boy like me needed a good deal of milk. They always told me when I came along why I could go in there and get me a drink of milk or buttermilk or anything that was in there getting cold that I wanted to drink. So, every evening before I went home, why I'd stop by the spring house and fix me a glass of good cold milk. That would make me survive until I got home, anyhow. After we got the corn planted and the weeds chopped and what not, why we made hay in the summertime.
I remember one day, it come a little sprinkle of rain and I didn't figure there would be anymore hay making for that day so I got a fishing pole and went down to the creek.. After I got down to the creek, I got to thinking, well, this old fishing hole here, in case the sun comes up, they'll sure find me. So, I went up the creek a pretty good piece where I was pretty certain I couldn't hear anybody holler. I went fishing and I caught me a couple of real good catfish. I took them over to this spring house. Outside the spring house there was a big water trough for the cattle and I put those two big old channel catfish in that water trough. Chet and Perry laughed at me and they said that I would never catch those fish out of that water trough. In a day or two, I wanted the fish one night when I was going home and I went and looked in that clear water and they was right over by the edge of the trough. The water in the trough was so much colder than the water in the creek that those old catfish was just floating there just as stiff as they could be and I just reached in and took them out and took them home.
I remember one morning when I was going to work, Mr. Corbitt was out cultivating his garden and he had a team of balking horses, or one of them was balking. He was going down the row and they would go just as hard as they could go then all at once they would stop and he would fall over the handles of his cultivator. He'd throw down the reins and run around and grab one of these horses by the ear and twist his ear and then he'd slap a clod in his mouth and run around and grab the reins again. Away they'd go just as hard as they could go just a little ways and then all at once the horse would stop and he'd fall over the cultivator again and run around and grab that old horse by the ear and twist his ear and wack a clod of dirt in his mouth and grab his reins again. I got a lot of fun out of watching it. It was the first time I'd seen a guy try that particular technique on a horse but it didn't seem to do him much good. About twenty or thirty feet seemed to be about as much as he could get at a time.
As I got bigger, why I got to working around Mission Center some, because Dad had kind of a small farm and we didn't have work all the time. Soon as I got big enough to where I could kind of pull a pitchfork a little, why I went to work for some of the neighbors, when there wasn't any work at home to do. About the first guy I worked for was named Preston McComb. He was kind of, maybe a little over religious sort of a guy. It took him so long to say the blessing that the food was generally about three fourths cold by the time he'd get through. He had an old horse and a mare that he worked the hay wagon. When I first worked for him I wasn't stout enough to pitch hay much, so he had me stack the hay. We'd put it on the wagon and he'd pitch it off onto a stack and tell me how to stack it. This old horse he had, he called Thomas. Old Thomas was about the laziest old son of a gun of a horse I ever saw. He kept the stay chain on this mare so she always pulled all the wagon and old Thomas, about all he did was just help hold up the tongue of the wagon. I can still hear old Preston saying, "Come on Thomas, old fella. Come on Thomas, old fella." That was just about all it amounted to. Old Thomas didn't pay any attention to him at all. So, one day we were getting hay down on the creek and it was a pretty hot afternoon and we lacked just a little bit of getting all the hay. Mr. McComb said, "Charlie, you take the team and go down and get that last little bit of hay that's down there." I said "alright." Soon as I got out of sight of the house, I limbered up the end of the line pretty good and I said, "Come on Thomas, old fella." He didn't pay any attention and I wrapped that line around the end of his flank and he was the most surprised looking horse you ever saw in your life. Until I got back to the house, he was still twitching his tail.
Preston McComb had two daughters that were about my age and one little girl. One of these girls named Jenny was in my grade at school and she sat in front of me. Schools were a little bit different then than they are now. We had a school room with about twenty kids, was about as many as we ever had. Most of the desks were double desks. We used to buy ink in a big old bottle. I guess it had about a gallon of ink maybe a little more in it. Each desk had a little glass container in it that was sunk down in the desk with a lid on it that we called an ink well. One day Jenny and another girl was sitting in front of me in a double desk and I was getting to be a pretty fair sized boy by that time I guess. Anyhow, I was beginning to notice that girls wasn't the same as boys anyhow. One day I was sitting there trying to figure how to pass the time and I noticed a big long braid of hair that belonged to Jenny hanging back on my desk so I stuck it in the ink well. She let out a little yippity yip and the teacher set me in between these two girls at this double desk. The one girl didn't care. She was a pretty tough old gal but poor little old Jenny, she just set there and put her head down on the desk and cried and cried. I was just a little scared of her from then on. There was four kids in my class at school. I guess I was about the third grade when I started there and I graduated from grade school there. I went to school with just four kids in the class all the years I went to Mission Center.
Note: There was not room in Family Tree Maker for the whole story. Contact WL Sterling if you wish to have the complete story and he has not somehow lost it.
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