Joyce Kropewnicki

At the Tipton farm through the big corral yard to the north of the house was the hired man’s house. This is different from the Mexican migrant workers house in the east part of the yard just pasted the potato dug out. The hired man had a permanent job and worked side by side with my Dad and brother to keep up with the farm work.

I think when I was about six the family that lived there was named Bray. They were regular people raising a family and trying to make a living. You could walk north down the dirt road a quarter of a mile to their house or go through the big corral yard. The corral yard sat mostly empty as I remember that the milk cows were kept in a different corral by the big barn. The corral yard had a big fenced in area for heifers (young cows) or maybe cattle raised only to sell or be butchered for food?

My Grandpa Carl Swanson was a big cattle man more than a dairyman. Carl had a corral on his farm and the one across the street on the property he also owned filled with cattle. He fattened them up on rich grain and hay, and then took them to market in Denver to sell them. Is seems we all thought he was pretty good at that job and highly thought of in the community for his management of cattle.

In the big corral yard at Tipton’s farm was also a concrete set up that was used to wash sheep. We never raised sheep so we just played on that set up. Along the board fence was a few lesser used pieces of machinery and an old buggy that had belonged to Frank Swanson. It was quite the thing with the open bench seat that you could imagine ladies sitting on all dressed to go to town. It had the oak posts that tied onto one horse that used to pull it. My dad showed this buggy with pride to all who ventured into the big corral yard. One summer Frieda Johnson (Carl Swanson’s sister) came with her grown son and liked the wagon so much they took it for her son and hauled it to Pasadena California to display it in their front yard. My dad, mom and I did visit with second cousins and saw the buggy there. It didn’t look near as appealing in a suburban setting. I remember going to their house, but can’t remember the guys name. He was an inventor of some type and was working on the body of a small go-cart type car that he had built himself. He was working with fiberglass which was a new material for the time in the early 1950’s. This was probably the same trip I talked about before when we went to Disneyland.

Another big hay wagon rested against the fence in the big corral yard. It had oak wagon wheels and was made in the about 1909. It had some boards across the bed of the wagon, but they weren’t the boards that came with it. Dad moved this across the street when we moved to the Swanson Farms in the late 1950’s. The wagon sat for in the back yard surrounded by other discards until the 1990’s when my husband Stan and son John dismantled it and hauled it to Lakewood in our Ford van. They reassembled it and the two units of wheels are in my front lawn now. We couldn’t move the long oak bed that connected the wheels together where the bed of the wagon was due to size. Those long pieces stayed behind the milk house for years until we had to burn them while cleaning up the property to sell.

Because my parent taught us the love for old things, especially if connected to departed family I have lots of treasures that probably should be moved along. I like keeping them so I do.

At the north of the big corral yard was a gate that you could peek in and see the hired man’s house. They had a little boy named Richie Bray that was about my age. He was keep mostly to his mommy so I really didn’t play much with him. When I did visit his mom would always offer me a snack which was white bread spread with butter and sprinkled with sugar. That is still a favorite today although I might toast the bread and include some cinnamon with the sugar. Sometimes she had a left over pancake that she did the same thing. I always same one pancake when I make them to cool off, spread with butter and sprinkle with some sugar. Yum Yum.

I think back now about the Bray’s and realize they were pretty poor. They didn’t have any jelly or jam to spread on the bread so sugar was the best treat the mom could offer me.

On the first of day of May, May Day, the tradition was that you would take a bunch of little cups, decorate them with crepe paper, add a pipe cleaner handle and put nuts or small candies in the cup. You would take these to school and pass them out to your classmates. I took one of these little may baskets over to Richie Bray’s through the big corral yard to his back gate. I think maybe my brother or sister went along to tease me. There was some silliness about giving the basket to a boy and then kissing him. I think I gave Richie the basket when he opened the gate and ran like the dickens so I wouldn’t be kissed.

The Greeley Tribune was delivered every afternoon around four. This was dad’s paper and we couldn’t touch it until he broke it open at the dinner table.

Mom would prepare the meal. Either Nancy or I would set the table with all the silverware in its proper place. I don’t remember having napkins for every day meals. Maybe we did have paper napkins. Paper products such as paper towels and Kleenex were not used to the extent we use them today. There was no dish washer except the women of the house. Dishes were washed by one person in soapy water, rinsed and placed in a drainer for the other person to dry. I was sometimes the drier and maybe my sister or mom the washer. If you were too short to reach the drainer, then a chair was pulled over so you could stand on the chair to reach the dishes. It was so cute to see little Nancy when she was a young child stand and that chair to do the dishes. Then it was my turn as I was 10 years younger than Nancy. Seems a little less cute today now that I think about it and more like child labor. I don’t think either my sister or I have stopped the dish activity in some odd fifty to sixty-five years. I still prefer dish towels to paper towels. However, mine are not the variety that my mom used that came in the laundry soap or held chicken feed. They didn’t have discount store such as a Walmart at the time and it was probably unheard of to buy dish towels when you get them free from soap boxes or feed sacks.

We blew our noses on handkerchiefs. Mom had a drawer with a small box padded with light blue satin that she kept her special handkerchiefs. They were ironed carefully, then folded and put in the box. Some had hand embroidery of delicate flowers while other had her initials. Some had lace edges. More ordinary ones were printed with flowers on the borders. My dad had red bandana type handkerchiefs. He tied them around his neck and brought them up over his nose when he worked in the fields with dusty hay or thrashing the wheat. I remember seeing him all covered with dust and dirt at the end of the day. He always changed his clothes before he came to the dinner table.

Mom had pulled out the comics for him and folded them in fourths so he could read them at his place. We always sat in the same seats at the dinner table with dad at the head. No one touched their food or fiddled with their silverware until we said grace together. It was a Swedish prayer that I know by heart, but can’t read or write any Swedish. Sometimes when we had company we would say a prayer before the meal in English. It was not the same words as the Swedish one. My brother-in-law Bob is the best person for grace. He always has something pertinent to the situation at hand.

We could read the funnies after dad was finished with them. Dagwood Bumested and Beatle Bailey were a couple of favorites. Dick Tracy was in the comics too, but I was too young to follow the story line.

Mom would look through the obituaries to see if anyone she knew had died. This was long before computers with email, facebook and twitter that provide instant messaging. Even phones were party lines that you shared with the neighbors. Some times you had metered phone service that only allowed so many calls per month. I guess that is similar to restrictions on minutes per month on cell phone usage. We used the phone infrequently. So the paper was the communication tool for the community. I suppose I read through the obituaries in the Denver Post occasionally just to see how long people live. I’ve been doing that once I head toward the finish line just to gage your possible live expectancy.

Mom would also cut out quilt patterns that were in the papers. She also subscribed to a few magazines such as Capper’s Weekly, Life and Look. Mom kept some racy True Story romance novels and magazines hidden from the rest of us that she read occasionally probably to break up the day to day monotony of being a farm wife that was filled with a day of chores and responsibilities.

The Sunday paper was the most fun. I think there were colored pages for the comic pages that day. Now we have colored photos throughout the paper.

Farming is hard work. My grandparents started working the fields with teams of horses. In the 1930s when they bought their 80 acre farm, they kept the horses in the big barn. The barn was two-stories. It had a place to store the hay in the upper level. All the harnesses and horse collars were hung on nails on the walls so they would be ready to harness up the animals for a days work. The horses could be let out in a fenced in carrel through the side doors of the barn.

My brother said that Frank O. Swanson, my great grandfather was a really tall big man. The horses were draft work horses and when Frank would sit on the horse his legs extended well down the side of the animal. There is an interesting enlargement of a photo of my dad, Harold as a young child about two in his grandfather Frank’s arms went Frank was sitting on one of these giant horses. I think I have the black and white negative of this photo. Jim, my sister Nancy’s oldest son has the actual photo.

Big horses lots of work. My dad, Harold and his brother, Clarence (called Swede) grew up working the fields with the horses until tractors came along. When they could afford tractors, they switched over from horses to plows, harrows and other machinery pulled by tractors.

Early on we may have farmed the fields at Tipton’s with horses, but mostly I remember Case tractors. My dad was loyal to the Case brand of farm equipment with its bright red-orange paint. Other farmers preferred the green of John Deere or grey of the International Harvester. It was Case for the Swansons. We did have one small grey Ford tractor that was use for smaller farm projects.

We lived in the three bedroom two-story house at Tipton’s. The steep stairs spilled out into kind of a big hall that was my brother’s bedroom. You had to go through that room to my parents bedroom. My twin bed was in my parent’s also. Walk around the corner and there was my sister Nancy’s room. She actually had her own staircase, but it seems this was not used very much. Not much privacy with the family walking between bedrooms to get to their room. Different from the way houses are set up today with hallways and doors to each bedroom. We had another bedroom on the main floor by the stair case that was our guest bedroom fully decked out with a double bed, white Martha Washington nubby bedspread and dresser. I don’t remember anyone ever being our guests, at least not often.

We had one bathroom off the guest room that had a big old tub with the claw feet, toilet, sink and some cupboards along one wall. It seems there was also a closet there too. I think the closet was in the bathroom. I was too little to know when the bathroom and running water were installed in the house. It must have been in the 1940’s as there was still a usable outdoor john next to the ash pit outside about 20 feet from the back door. The ash pit was where we burned the trash. It was made of large colored brick and was about ten foot square. It had a two foot square hole in the top where you dump the trash. I think there was an other fifty-five gallon barrel that we throw the cans. Recycling before its time.

There was a large tin shed with big sliding doors used to store machinery at the east end of the yard between the potato cellar and the back yard of the house. There was another brick shed used to store machinry in that same area that probably was used for animals at some time before we moved there as there was no door just the brick walls and overhead roof. It was pretty big, maybe about three double garages wide.

Other machinery was lined up at the edges of the buildings until they were needed for farm operations. It took a lot of different types of machinry to grow all the different types of crops. My dad grew everything; sugar beets, potatoes, alfalfa, onions, sometimes barley or wheat, corn of course and pinto beans. He wasn’t much for vegetable crops like carrots or cucumbers. The soil might have been too rocky or this type of crop didn’t really appeal to him. Now farmers specialize to one to two crops to maximize their return and keep their equipment purchases to a minium.

To work the farm in the summer, Dad would hired migrant workers from Texas or Mexico. They mostly spoke Spanish only and Dad learned enough Spanish to communicate with the Mexicans as we called them. They stayed in a migrant house that was next to the tin shed. It was two rooms with an outside pit toilet. I think he piped in some running water some how. This was low tech and an upgrade from what the migrants had before they came to Colorado to work. The laws and requirements for housing are much different today along with status of migrants being legal aliens or illegal. In the 1940’s – 1950’s this wasn’t an issue. These were just people who needed a job and my Dad had one for them.

Many people lived in this Mexican house, as we called it. It took a lot of people to walk up and down the rows of crops thinning the sugar beets or weeding the fields. Today much of this work in accomplished by machinery or chemicals that treat the soil and seed to better manage the weeds. It was what it was at that time.

We were told to not talk or play with the Mexicans. They were always a raft of children that came with the adult families living in this house. They were told to stay in their yard by the tin shed and we were told to stay in our yard between the chicken coop and barn to the house.

Being the inquisitive kid that I was, I ventured back to the brick shed to play or chat with several of the Mexican kids. I was about five or six at the time. I sat down on the edge of a harrow or some type of equipment that had long metal fingers and was about butt high for a kid to sit. It was stored by the brick building. This was close to the barn so it was almost in our yard, not the Mexicans. The machinery was propped up with a pretty thick wooden stick so it would be ready to load onto the tractor.

As I set there swinging my little legs back and forth waving and chatting with the Mexican kids, the stick wiggled with me. Boom! The stick gave way and the machinery fell on the calf of my left leg. The little Mexican kids ran to the milk barn to get my Dad and brother who were milking the cows at the time. Quickly they lifted that machinery like it was light as a feather and pulled my out from under the machinery. Dad carried me over to the car to check out my leg. I’m sure there was a panic from my mom as she scurried out of the kitchen to see what had happened. I vaguely remember either being scolded for talking with the Mexican kids or expecting the scolding. I don’t remember if it was that night that we went to the doctor or the next day. I’m sure the milking chores still needed to be finished. I remember the doctor saying that the fatty cells were smashed and there would be an indention in my calf. There still is a slight one. As I wasn’t trying out for any beauty contests, it didn’t matter.