Brewer Chronicles - Spoiled Kid

Me

With two older sisters and one older brother, I have to admit that I received special treatment. Sometimes, I was favored, but other times I was targeted. Any boy that had a brother a few years older than him can relate. It DID prepare me for my future military experiences of surprise battles with superior forces and gas attacks (especially just before falling asleep).

My earliest memories were playing in my huge playground at the edge of the tomato fields. We raised ACRES of tomatoes in my early years. Dad fed the animals, worked for all of the daylight hours in the fields, and then fed the animals again. Mom worked all day plus provided three full meals. My day consisted of pretending that a block of wood was a tractor plus ducking from airborne rotten tomatoes from my brother. It honed my reflexes from an early age.

They also included the joy of being immersed in a zoo with a wide range of animals. What kid wouldn’t enjoy have a bunch of piglets rooting on him and begging for a belly rub? Or scratch the neck of a huge steer while it laid its head on your shoulder? They all had names – even the chickens.

Timmy and Lassie would have been jealous over the relationships that I had with my dogs. During those years, a dog was always within arm’s reach. I had the run of the whole 240 acres with my dog at my side. I think we covered them all every day.

My first memories (around 4 years old) of doing something with Dad was sitting between his knees on a B John Deere in the fields. It wasn’t too long before I was steering while plowing, disking, cultivating, … Anyone that knows anything about these tractors will testify that you have to be pretty big and strong to steer, use the hand clutch, and the brakes. By six, I was able to stand and do these with Dad supervising and saving my butt a few times. By eight, he would do other things and expect me to be OK. By age ten, he expected me to be able to back a wagon load of hay into place the first time. By 12, I was home alone on a tractor pulling a disk while my parents went to town. Some people would probably think today that was child abuse. I am so thankful that he provided the skills, trust, and confidence from all that he gave me. These provided the seeds for success in so many areas in my future life.

During this time, my brother, my cousin, and I had a cowboy range that would make Roy Rogers jealous. The wild horses (made from readily available sticks) were tamed after some serious bucking to become loyal genius steeds. The woods, large pasture, creeks, BIG boulders, and corral (barn) were witnesses to some major gun battles that always got the bad guys terminally wounded and dead after some major dying throes.

A hand painted sign over the wood house announced the Brewer Garage. Every toy and bicycle was disassembled and reassembled many times in this facility. I realized later how Dad was so tolerant of so many of his tools missing. He was actually complicit by including my brother and me in all of his repair and maintenance of the farm equipment. Helping him repair the tire on the hay rake gave us the confidence to repair our bike tires. By first showing us the importance of lubricating and changing oil by showing us not only ‘how’, but ‘why’ (“Oil and grease doesn’t cost anything”).

It may not make sense to outsiders that even though a farmer raises animals for slaughter that they can love them.  Dad taught me that. He showed that in so many ways by the respect that he gave them. He wouldn’t beat his animals. Although he normally would be an animal ‘whisperer’, I did hear him yell at them a few times (after trying to get a sow into a farrowing pen with her piglets for hours in the middle of winter). He had a rule for us: We don’t eat until the animals are fed and have water. That still goes through my mind when I feed my dog today. Even though I was always in awe of his strength and manliness, I was never surprised when I saw him with a sick or injured animal, aiding in birth, or nurturing a new born.  We spent many nights in awful weather bringing the sows and their piglets into safe and comfortable pens. I always felt a mutual respect for him from the animals.

Some of the animals left a lasting impression on me. A sow pig will usually have 8 to 12 piglets in a litter. One of them had only one, and what a pig it was.  It was about four times the size of a normal newborn pig and it was built like a linebacker – nothing but a snout peeking out of a set of massive shoulders. We called it ‘Jug’ because that is what it looked like. Plus, it had an attitude. When it was a couple of days old, it attacked my brother when we were trying to catch it and return it to its mother.

We had a calf born in February (near zero) near where a board was missing from the barn. Its ears and tail got major frostbite and subsequently fell off. It looked funny enough as a calf, but it was hilarious when it weighed over a half ton. It had a personality of an affectionate pussycat.

During this time, I also experienced the trials and tribulations of living on the farm. Stables need to be cleaned. Corn had to be hand shucked. Animals had to be fed even if it was raining, sleeting, snowing, or if you felt like crap. Our house was heated by wood stoves that scorched the side facing it while ice formed on the other side. We didn’t have indoor plumbing (bad enough in the warm weather, but brutal in the winter). We had to pump and carry our water (Dad liked to tell people “We have running water, but you have to run and get it”).

We had kerosene lamps. Our radio ran on a battery that had to be charged by the tractor or car. We would crowd around it and listen to Henry Aldrich, Baby Snooks, The Inner Sanctum, Jack Benny, and other fine shows. A dishpan of popcorn and some Kool-Aid made the evening complete.

 

Every Tuesday, the ‘peddler’ would drive a school bus converted into an ‘Amazon on wheels’ up the ridge. (I am still amazed at all of the things he had on that bus) Mom would grab a couple of chickens, we would walk out to the county road, and wait a while for the peddler. Mom would trade the chickens for some vital supplies plus a candy bar for each of us. Somehow, my brother would always trick me so that he would end up with mine.

We were one of the first to have a television in our neighborhood. Dad bought a NINETEEN inch (Dad always like to stretch) Crosley TV from Pickelheimers. The cabinet was as wide as a car with the round tube in the center. It was a surprise to us. When we topped the hill in our lane, we could see this TALL (95 feet) pipe sticking above the trees near our house. They were turning the TV on by the time we got to the house 20 minutes later. Just in time to watch Kate Smith sing “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain”. We were glued to the TV to watch Flash Gordon, Howdy Doody, and then Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. Dad pushed us out of the way to watch John Cameron Swayze do the news. We could only get four stations - 11 and 3 from Louisville, 4 from Bloomington, and (with some tweaking by turning the antenna) 5 from Cincinnati.

Friday nights were very exciting. A lot of the neighbors would drop by to watch the Friday night TV. Our living room would be crowded with people having a good time. It was our version of Facebook at that time. Mom would make a couple dish pans of popcorn. The kids would choose from grape or cherry Kool-Aid and the adults would have some beer and/or whiskey. The evening would begin with some classical music by Pee Wee King followed by wrestling. A lot of bets were made for/against The Wild Red Berry versus Von Bomber. I learned very early in my years to sleep through people firing guns into the sky at the middle of the night.

Unless the weather was particularly bad, Dad usually had a project for Saturday mornings (clean the fence row, move some hay, rework the pig pen, cut some firewood, hand shuck some corn, and other amazing efforts). Otherwise, we watched the "It's the Buster Brown Show!!" with "That's my dog Tiger, he lives in a shoe!! I'm Buster Brown, look for me in there, too!!", "Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!!", and “Hi, ya! Hi, ya!”. This was educational TV at its finest.

I am so glad that no one told us that we were poor at that time because I would never have believed them.