Steve Dimick — Law 'n' Stuff

Phearmans

Oh, there’s nothing halfway
About the Iowa way to treat you,
When we treat you
Which we may not do at all.

Meredith Willson, “Music Man”

1850 – 1946

Mildred was born in 1916, the youngest of five, also on a farm, just outside of Prairie City, Iowa, only a few miles north of Des Moines.  Her father, Charles Phearman, was of solid German and English stock.  His father, Joseph Phearman, who was probably Jewish, came to the United States in the late 1850’s and settled in Monmouth, Illinois, where northern and eastern European immigrants were preferred soap factory workers because they were used to wearing wooden shoes, which protected their skin from the lye used in the soap-making process.

Nobody knows what made Joseph so bitter about the Old Country – whether it was anti-Semitism, poverty, politics or maybe just a falling out with his family.  With one exception he never –  ever – spoke of his past.  Charles was never even able to find out the names of his paternal grandparents.

The only thing Joseph ever told his family about Germany was that he left to avoid the draft.  This seems odd because in July, 1862, he joined the 83d Regiment of the Illinois Volunteers to fight in the Civil War.

Unfortunately, a case of dysentery laid him low and he was discharged that December.  Ten years later, he moved to Prairie City, where he met and married Sarah Jane Rigby, a first-generation English-American born in New Jersey who never lost the English accent inherited from her mother.

*

Joseph didn’t marry until he was in his 40s, and Sarah (Sadie) was 20 years younger than he.  Perhaps that (and perhaps, also the fact that he was taciturn and German) explains the strange relationship between them.  Mildred remembers it as a “battle of the sexes,” with Joseph and son Charlie on one side and Sadie and the two daughters, Aunt Ella and Aunt Emma, on the other.

At one point, after some sort of a falling-out, Joseph and Sadie stopped talking to each other for the conveniently Biblical period of seven years.  Nobody knows what caused the rift, only that they would communicate through the children: “Tell your mother to pass the salt.”  “Tell your father it’s right under his nose.”

I’m not so interested in what caused the little spat.  It could have been anything.  Farm life in those days was pretty stifling.  With no electricity, no car, no telephone, television or radio, with weekly baths in a washtub in the kitchen, a “two-holer” outhouse and a bedpan under the bed so you didn’t have to trudge through the snow to the privy in the middle of the night, couples were pretty much stuck with each other all day, every day, every year.

No, what I want to know is: after seven years, what made them start talking again?

*

“My Dad,” Mildred wrote to me, “probably as a natural reaction to the rift, thought Grandma wasn’t capable of making any kind of a decision.  She lived with us for a year after Aunt Ella died, then went to live with the other daughter and died there.   She did tend to leave the decisions all up to Dad and Aunt Emma – as I don’t remember hearing anything about what she wanted to do – she just stayed where they told her to stay.

“But I do remember that she could be stubborn if it suited her.  She refused to go any place, which meant someone had to ‘grandma sit’ with her whenever we were going out.  And going out was a special occasion to us then, whether because I was very young or whether it was even to my parents, I don’t know.  On Old Settlers’ Day she could be persuaded to go to the afternoon festivities, but in the evening, she just wasn’t up to going again, so someone had to miss and stay with her.”

*

Joseph’s only son, my grandfather Charles, was 28 when he married 18-year-old Mabel Jones.  There is a definite pattern, here.  A girl would be a spinster if not married by 21 or 22, but a farmer couldn’t marry until he could afford to support a family.  This age difference would not apply, of course, to hired hands, clerks or other wage earners.  Roy and Daisy Dimick were only three years apart.  But it seemed to be fairly typical among the landed folks.

My mother’s and father’s secret beliefs about their respective class status probably had a great deal to do with their total incompatibility.

*

Life on the Iowa farm was paradise.

Or, if it wasn’t, it was at least remembered as such.  I never heard my mother or any of my four aunts and uncles speak about “the farm” with anything but wistfulness.

It was a time that was “lost” in March, 1935, when Charlie and Mabel loaded the last of their possessions into their wagon and their car, said their goodbyes to their neighbors and their hired help and drove – one last time – to town where Charlie, at 61 years old, tried to start over by doing odd jobs, being a handyman for the Odd Fellows Lodge and mowing lawns at the cemetery.

It was also a pre-war time.  We always look back with nostalgia at pre-war times.  Usually, we’re right.

*

Charles Phearman was not rich, by any means.  But while topsoil in most parts of Oklahoma was almost nonexistent, and the subsoil was hard-packed, sticky, clayey red mud, Iowa topsoil was almost two feet deep with rich, black loam.  A careful and hard-working farmer could make a comfortable living and raise a family on a modest farm.  And that’s what Charlie did.  Until he got too ambitious.

Carl, the oldest child, became a farmer for love of the land, even though he had other opportunities, and even though Charlie’s dreams of a land legacy for each of his children fell through.  None of the other children took to farming.  Roy became a successful salesman, Leo a college professor and Ruth Adah a housewife.  And Mildred?  She became a chapter or two in a memoir.

Anyway, Mildred wrote to me, the family was very “lucky.”

“We had a power washing machine – used a gasoline engine with a belt which powered the machine.  When I was small, I always knew it was wash day as I’d wake up in the morning and hear that gasoline engine putting along turning the wheels on the machine.

“We heated the water in a big iron kettle (don’t you remember the iron kettle the folks had by the barn at their place in Prairie City?)  It was dipped out and poured into the machine and the clothes run through.  Very seldom was laundry done oftener than once a week.  You can see why, if they had to plan that far in advance: to get up early, build the fire, fill the kettle and then go through all the gyrations of cranking that gasoline motor to get it started to run the washer.”

*

Years ago, I asked Mildred for memories of life on the farm.  A frustrated writer herself, she sent me several short essays.  None except “soap making” were anything other than nostalgic.

“Our day started at dawn.  I remember my father getting up and going down to the kitchen to light the fire.  First, he would shake down the ashes from the grate.  When they were all shaken into the ashpan, he would use corncobs soaked in coal oil to kindle the fire.  You may think all the older generations used kindling, but we were in the middle of the grainbelt and there was no room for trees to use for wood – all our land was for growing crops and grazing animals.  Once the cobs were lighted, more dry ones were added and when they were blazing good he carefully poured small lumps of coal over the fire and it soon began to burn slowly.”

The Prairie City house in the 1950’s still had a coal stove in the kitchen (no longer used) and a corn crib in the barn (just next to the two-hole privy) nearly full of dried corn cobs.

“By then Mom was up and she put on the tea kettle and the coffee pot.  Then it was time for the rest of us to get into our work clothes, which smelled like the last job we had done, like milking in the barns, cleaning the horse stables or the chicken house.  All of us went to the barn except my sister, and her job was to take care of the chickens.

“My dad would already have the cows in their stanchions.  These were home made ones – two upright pieces of wood worn smooth with time, and a piece on a hinge across the top.  When this was raised the two pieces were parted and the cows came in and put their heads through in order to feed.  Then we would push the wood together and let the top piece come down and they were locked in place.

“Lots of people used one-legged stools, but we were really uptown.  We had factory-made stools:  one side to sit on and connected to that was a rack that we set the milk bucket in so we didn’t have to hold it between our knees.”

While the kids milked, Charlie tended to the eight horses, which were kept in double stalls and worked in teams together.

Milk was something of a byproduct.  What the farmers used for themselves was cream.  Twice daily, the milk buckets would be carried to the house and down to the cellar where the milk was strained and then run through a separator.  When cranked by hand, cream ran out one spout and skim milk out the other.  The cream went to the kitchen for cereal, coffee and cooking.  Skim milk was for the hogs and calves.  High-density lipoproteins hadn’t been invented yet.

Sour milk and sour cream, although they were readily available, were not considered a delicacy.  “My mother would have been repulsed if you had asked her to eat sour cream on her baked potatoes,” Mildred remembered.  “Sour milk was to use in cornbread, biscuits, cakes or to make cottage cheese.  Sour cream was used in baking and to churn butter.”

By the time the milk was separated, Mabel would have breakfast ready:  bacon or sausage (or both), eggs, toast, biscuits and gravy.  In the fall, pan-fried steak was a common breakfast. In fact, steak two or three times a day was not uncommon during butchering season.  “But by the end of summer, when it was still too warm to butcher and cure our own meat and we had run out of our supply, breakfast might be dried codfish gravy, biscuits and fried potatoes.  It didn’t taste as bad as it sounds, and certainly not as bad as it smelled.”

After breakfast, the kids would wash up in the kitchen to get rid of the splattered cow shit and the barn smell and head off to school (about two miles) with the lunch pails Mabel had somehow found time to pack.

**

Food and dietary requirements have had dramatic effects on human history.  Our word “salary,” for instance, refers to the Roman custom of paying soldiers an extra stipend to allow them to buy salt, which was virtually the only flavoring and only preservative available at the time.  Gandhi’s Salt March of 1930 helped unite the Indian populace against the ruling British, who had a monopoly on the salt trade.  Goiter, an unsightly neck growth usually accompanied by a measurable lowering of mental capacity, was endemic in the United States until the introduction of iodized salt in 1924.

Every school child knows the lucrative spice trade and the search for a shorter route to the Indies led to the discovery of America.  Spices were highly coveted for their ability to conceal the taste of spoiled meat, there being but limited ways to store it.

Historically, there was no real way to store fruits and vegetables, short of drying them, and no amount of spices will save a spoiled peach.  Vegetables being impossible to keep for any length of time, British sailors on months-long sea voyages during the Napoleonic Wars tended to develop scurvy from their limited diet of dried or salted beef and hardtack, and no vitamin C.

Napoleon Bonaparte, fielding massive armies which had to be provisioned, announced a prize of 12,000 francs in 1795 for the discovery of a way to preserve food in sealed containers.  Coincidentally, in the same year, the British Navy began provisioning its ships with lime juice.   The juice was acidic enough to keep for long periods of time, eradicated scurvy and gave British sailors their nickname, “Limeys.”

Napoleon’s prize was claimed in 1809 by a French chef who invented the process of canning, which was adopted immediately by the French and gradually by other governments.   Widely used by the North during the American Civil War, it would be another 50 years or more, however,  before it had much of an effect on the general populace.  It wasn’t until 1858, when Adolphus Dimick and Joseph Phearman were young men, that the Mason jar was invented, and it would be many more years before it was refined into its present design and accepted by farmers across the country.

*

When my grandmother, Mabel Phearman, was young, around the turn of the century, she used to help dry apples and corn in the summer against the coming winter.  By the time Mildred was a girl, canning in Mason jars had finally reached Prairie City.

“We canned green beans, sweet corn, tomatoes and green peas,” Mildred wrote.  “They made their own Kraut and I think kept it in one of those stone jars.  I know they kept pickles in the stone jars when I was quite young.  As I grew older, they started making the pickles and putting them in Mason jars and sealing them with the regular jar lids.  We had a barrel buried at the side of the lawn where we stored heads of cabbage, onions, carrots, turnips and parsnips.  This was covered with straw to keep it from freezing.  We kept potatoes and apples in the cellar.

“Also, we ate canned fruit in the winter time: peaches, pears, plums, grapes and berries of several kinds, strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, blackberries, mulberries and elderberries mixed with apples.”

Charlie both smoked and salted meat.  In later years, he relied more on salt and smoke-flavored salt to preserve the meat.  This seems to me to be going backwards, but I suppose smoking is much more labor intensive than salting.  Later still, they discovered they could can beef.  That, of course, would be woman’s work, so Charlie probably opted for canning exclusively.

Pork, however, was “fried down:” cooked, placed in a stone jar and completely covered with melted lard.  If kept in the cellar, the lard congealed and formed an airtight coating around the meat, preventing it from spoiling.  The same process is still used today in France to preserve duck (“duck confit,” one of my favorite dishes) and goose.

The family made their own root beer from Hires Root Beer Extract, placed the batch in a jug and lowered the jug into the well to cool.  In the fall, if there were any nice watermelons left, they would be burrowed deep into the oat bin for storage.  Some years they had watermelons to eat as late as Thanksgiving.

There was no electricity on the farm.  Charlie had a windmill that pumped water for the stock, but the women weren’t as important as the stock, so all the water used in the house had to be pumped by hand and carried in buckets.  Later, the waste water had to be carried out again.

The Phearmans didn’t even have an ice box, there being no public icehouse in Prairie City.  But when Mabel traveled the 25 miles into Des Moines to see the doctor for her undiagnosed “condition,” and if they felt there were a few coins to spare they would buy a 50-pound block of ice, wrap it in newspapers and carry it home on the running board of the Model T.

Then it was ice cream time.  Eggs less than a day old.  Milk less than an hour from the cow and thick, yellow, rich cream.  Add some sugar, some Watkins vanilla extract and a little salt and it was ready to be cranked.  One of the kids always had to sit on the container while the older folks cranked, to keep the cooler submerged in the salty ice.

The greatest treat was to lick the paddle.  Or, maybe the greatest treat was, with no refrigeration, the family had to eat all of the ice cream by the end of the evening.

**

Charlie Phearman had two obsessions:  education and land.  Joseph had pulled him out of school after the sixth grade to work in the fields.  Charlie was adamant that none of his children would be field hands.

All of Charlie’s children finished high school.  His third, Uncle Leo, went on to get his PhD and to teach at California State University at Long Beach.  His last, Mildred, was graduated from high school two years early, received a two-year degree and, after a stint working in Des Moines, returned to Prairie City to teach in the town’s one-room school.

Mildred hated teaching.

**

Land.

It drove the Oklahoma pioneers who had none, and it drove the midwestern farmers who did.  It certainly drove Charlie Phearman, who had a comfortable farm, with no mortgage, but who wanted the best for his boys.

The farm down the road was for sale, and Charlie was doing fine.  Wheat and corn were bringing bounty prices and Charlie wanted to ensure that each of his three boys had a sustainable farm.  He went to the bank and took out a mortgage on his farm to buy the farm down the road.

*

In medieval England, the source for all American property laws, a “gage” was a challenge, a pledge or a security for a pledge.  Land being the source of all wealth and, therefore, almost sacred, the last thing a gentleman would pledge as security for a loan or a gambling debt was his property.  Such a pledge was known as a “mort-gage” or “death pledge.”

Many a midwestern farmer discovered the true meaning of the death pledge in the 1930’s,  Charlie Phearman among them.

*

Mabel Phearman kept diaries for most of her life.  On Mabel’s death, Mildred tossed all of them save one:  a tiny two-by-four-inch book for 1935 provided free by Edwards Coal Company (“Phone 20″), with room for a week’s entries (five lines each, if you wrote quite small) on each double page.  1935 was when the Phearmans lost their farm, and the tragic shows up amid the mundane in Mabel’s brief diary entries:

January, 1935

Friday, 4: Went to Newton, got 2 every day dresses for 85c.

Monday, 7: Dad went to Newton.  I was alone all day.  Cut up a hog & made sausage.  Worked on rug.

Friday, 11.  Dad went to D.M. [Des Moines].  I baked cookies 2 pine apple pies & a mince pie.  Mildred come home.

Saturday, 12.  I made ice cream.  Mildred went to Dentist.  It rained off & on all day.

Sunday, 13.  Went to church.  Bally died. [Bally was a horse.]  Miller skinned him.  Vernie had new calf.  Our pond was froze.

Friday, 18.  Ironed.  Miller helped Dad roll up Okies fence.  Dad washed his face & shaved.  Cloudy all day. [The emphasis is Mabel’s.]

Saturday, 19.  Dad went to Newton & took exams for P[ost] O[ffice]. It rained nearly all day & was icy.  Turned colder & snowed a little toward evening.

Sunday, 20.  Cold, 4 below zero.  Dad & I got 2 cart loads of fodder out of the field.  It was so icy & slick.  Wayne & Wendell helped us with one load.  Ramona calf was dead.

Monday, 21.  16 below zero this morn.  Sun shone but didn’t warm up much.  Dad bought a ton of alfalfa hay for $30.  Jersey had a calf it was dead.

Tuesday, 22.  Hauled in 3 shocks fodder with Henrys team.  I made me 2 aprons out of old dresses.

*

The next day, Mabel and Charlie’s world collapsed around them.  It wasn’t unexpected, but a haunting dread became a dread reality.  Mabel summed it up in only ten words:

Wednesday, 23.  The sherriff was here & read our paper to us.

Charlie was 61 years old, unemployed and landless.

*

Thursday, 24.  Dad went to town.  Hauled in more fodder.

Friday, 25.  Henry & Andrew were here & got a old bob sled to fix theirs up.

Saturday, 26.  Dad butchered a beef.  Miller helped.  Went to town in P.M.  Got $1.14 for hide.

Sunday, 27.  Lenas [Mabel’s sister, Aunt Lena,  and Uncle Lester], Nellie [another sister] and R.A. [daughter Ruth Adah] were here.  I didn’t go to church.  Dad went to Charlie Shaffer’s funeral.

Monday, 28.  Canned 4 qt. beef baked 2 berrie pies.  Bess fell & couldn’t get up.

Tuesday, 29.  Canned 14 qt. more beef.  Dad went to D.M.  Had Bess killed when he got home.

February, 1935

Friday, 1.  Mildred come home.

Saturday, 2.  Leo come.  We washed & ironed.  Roy & Frankie come & stayed all night.

Sunday, 3.  Leo left on 10 o’clock buss.  Mildred went to S.S [Sunday School].  Carls [son and daughter-in-law] come.  Mildred went back with Hollises.

Monday, 4.  Getting ready for the sale.  Sun shone.  Thawed a good deal.

Tuesday, 5.  Canned 7 qt. beef.  Gerdena come to help get ready for sale.

Wednesday, 6.  Sale day.  Womans council served lunch.  Very cold.  I was sick & called Dr. Van.  Throwed up & run off.

Thursday, 7.  Carls left.  I was some better but felt miserable.

Friday, 8.  Cleaned up in here & went to D.M.  Not very spry yet.  Got Mildred.

Saturday, 9.  We went house hunting.   Not very successful.  Dad went to see Neal Dickenberg.

For the next month, it “snowed and blowed.”  When it wasn’t freezing, it was muddy walking to Prairie City from the farm.  (It was only three or four miles, and the car was used only for long distances.)  Mabel continued her farm chores, packed, cleaned the house and washed the curtains for the new owner and still found time to help out her neighbors and to help Miller, the hired hand, pack.  Charlie looked for work and for a place to live, but also found time to help the neighbors.  That’s what farm folks do.

Mildred came home from Des Moines every weekend.  She would return to Prairie City later that year to teach school and help care for the folks.  The other kids visited weekly to help can, clean and pack, as did sisters Nellie and Lena.

Tuesday, 12.  Went to Steenhoeks to butcher our hog.  Stayed all day.  Walked home.  It sure was muddy.

Wednesday, 13.  Worked at our meat. Made sausage.  It rained.

Saturday, 16.  Dad helped haul in some fodder for Neal.

Sunday, 17.  Walked to S.S.  Still awfully muddy.  Croziers come over in wagon in P.M.

Thursday, 21.  Went to Colfax with Lena.  Looked at some houses.  Dickenbergs were here in Eve.

Thursday, 28.  Helped Mrs. Crozier.  Ironed & mended & packed a box of dishes.

March, 1935

Friday, 1.  Helped Mrs. Crozier.  I ironed, baked bread.  We packed 3 or 4 boxes of clothes & pictures.

Monday, 4.  Still blowing.  I washed parlor & bedroom curtains.  Ironed them all too.

Tuesday 5.  Helped Mrs. C.  Got home late.  Dad went to Newton.  Got notice to leave.

Wednesday, 6.  Helped Mrs. Crozier.  Got home late.  Dad went to D.M. with Fred.

In early March, they found a house in Prairie City, and struck a deal.  Just two blocks from downtown and the town square, the place was just shy of a quarter-acre, with a two-story house, two wells (one drinkable, one only good enough for washing and watering the garden) and a barn.  The purchase price was $900 – $600 down and $50 a month until paid off.

The kids chipped in the money for the purchase, with Mildred, unmarried and frugal, providing the lion’s share.  Mildred also co-signed the purchase contract and agreed to pay the yearly taxes.

According to the purchase contract, the house was subject to a lease to a Tom Timmons.  Mabel’s diary indicates a problem with getting Timmons to vacate, and it is unclear whether Charlie and Mabel had to find temporary lodging.

Thursday, 7.  Dad went to town to make a deal with Martins.  Thinks it will go through.  I packed pictures & books.

Friday, 8.  Helped Mrs. Miller pack.  Dad got Mildred.

Saturday, 9.  Walter Telfer & wife looked at place.  Walter bought it.

Tuesday, 12.  We packed all day.  Everything up stairs.  The crowd come by in waggons to bid us goodbye.  22 were here.

Wednesday, 13.  Took 2 loads to town.  I cleaned the east room up stairs & put up 2 beds.

Thursday, 14.  Took another load.  Mr. T. said he wouldn’t get out for 30 days.

Thursday, 21.  Cleaned attic.  Baked cookies.  Mopped.  Took bath.  Worked on rug.

Thursday, March 21, is the last entry in Mabel’s tiny 1935 diary.

*

Mildred taught in Prairie City’s one-room school in 1935-36 and 1936-37.  Children, however, held little interest for her.  Also, she was only 19 and 20 years old and some of the farm boys may well have been almost as old as she, probably as large and more rambunctious, and certainly less tidy.  Despite her chuckles over being splattered with cow shit while milking, Mildred did not like untidiness.  This feeling extended to pets, children and life in general.

After two years of teaching, she headed off for the big city — Des Moines — to wait tables and attend business college.  It was 1937, the year Dwain’s first child (my half-brother, Dwain Lee Dimick, Jr.) was born.  She was not quite 21 and had never had a boyfriend or been on a date.

The next eight years would be the happiest years of her life.  She met and roomed with the only two real friends she would ever have.

**

Dwain somehow found a job with the Santa Fe Railroad and by the time he was drafted had worked his way up to fireman.  In the days of steam locomotives, the fireman was the fellow who kept the fire stoked with wood or coal – even, at one time, with surplus Egyptian mummies.  You could look it up.  But that’s another story.

With the introduction of the diesel locomotive, the job of fireman became a safety backup for the engineer and an engineer-in-training (according to the union) or a wholly superfluous position (according to management.)  In the 1950’s, when the union movement was still strong and the country hadn’t yet abandoned its railroads, “featherbedding” was the word used by management to describe the union’s insistence that there be a fireman on every locomotive.

Luckily, Dwain never got anywhere near combat, but was sent instead to India.  The “Burma Hump,” a treacherous flight over the Himalaya Mountains, supplied oil, gasoline, troops and supplies to the American Volunteer Group (the “Flying Tigers”) who were fighting the Japanese from bases in China.  All of these troops and supplies were moved to Assam, India, from Bombay by rail, and Dwain found himself an engineer.

It may well have been the happiest time of his life.  There was no danger and no shooting – just driving a train and having fun.  So what if a GI only earned $30 a month. Women were cheap and a dollar would buy a woman for a week, a meal for the entire enlisted company or, probably, half a farm.  Dwain had dozens of stories about off-duty exploits in India, but I was too young when I heard them to remember them now.

What he didn’t have was a girlfriend back home to write to.  Almost everybody else had a wife or girlfriend back in the States.  One of Dwain’s Army buddies was from Iowa and was writing to a girl in Des Moines who happened to be an acquaintance of Mildred Phearman.  Buddy asked his Iowa sweetie if she knew anybody who might like to write to a lonely soldier.

Mildred, then in her late 20’s, more than a little shy and becoming desperate because of the lack of men at home during the war, agreed to begin writing to India.

*

Dwain was evidently as charming and persuasive in his letters as he could be in person.  During one of their many, early separations, less than a year after they were married, Mildred wrote to Dwain from Iowa that “I always sort of felt about you like I suppose a lot of girls feel about their favorite movie stars – you were the ideal of my dreams.  I still can’t quite conceive how it all came about.”

Dwain was among the earliest of the U.S. troops to be demobilized, and was home in Oklahoma by at least November, 1945.  On a whim, as he later told Mildred, he telephoned the Iowa girl he had corresponded with for the past two or three years.  She invited him to come to Iowa, and he arrived in Prairie City on December 10.  They were married three days later.

Mildred didn’t admit this last to me until I was almost 50, and she only reluctantly confessed it even then.  Sixty years later, people seem to do this with some regularity: exchange e-mails for a time, finally meet the other side and marry him/her three days later.  In 1945, it wasn’t something you admitted to just anybody.

Had it worked out, I suppose she would have come to be proud of the three-day courtship.  Unfortunately, she married Dwain.  Not quite equally unfortunately – but bad enough, nonetheless – Dwain married Mildred.