Being boys and doing crap WAY before we think too hard about it, a bunch of us cousins/brothers decided that playing war would be way better if we actually shot at each other with our BB Guns (at least they weren’t pump pellet guns).

So, we loaded them up with BBs and dispersed into the corn field on the back side of the farm. It was fun, scary and really stupid so don’t do this at home. We would run fast through the corn rows, trying to dodge the BBs. You could hear them
approaching you as they ricocheted off the leaves and stalks. This was “hugely” helpful because you could at least drop to the ground or zigzag when you heard them coming your way.

This continued until a fateful BB headed my way. I had taken my shirt off earlier because it was hot, and I was sweaty. I was running out in the
open with my arms swinging as fast as they would move, and low and behold, I get hit right in the armpit. Now, that doesn’t sound bad to the uninitiated. But let me tell you, it hurt like a bitch. There was no blood but lots of loud swearing. I surrendered and ran to the house. I don’t recall if we told Mom what we had been doing, but I know we never did it again.

This is another Barn story. One day, probably a Holiday, all of the “clans” were at the farm. At some point, all of the cousins were in the barn in the hay loft. The loft was full of bales of hay stacked well over a dozen feet high.At some point one of us thought they heard some “scratching” up on top of the stack. The older cousins thought we were crazy and ignored us. But more of us heard the noise, or at least thought we did. The power of suggestion? Maybe.

Dave finally decided to shut us up and climbed to the top of the stack. As he peered over the top, he came face-to-face with a carnivore. A huge feline of some sort, or so he claims. He screamed “bobcat” and jumped off the stack as the rest of us all ran down the steps and out of the barn.

Our grandfather soon came over with his shotgun to slay the terrible beast. But it was nowhere to be found. The story has changed over the years, much like a fishing story. Below are the three variations.

 
 

<<< In later years, this is what Dave claimed he saw in the barn on top of a large stack of hay bales.
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

<<< This is what we believe Dave actually saw.
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

<<< This is what we compromised on.

As I mentioned before, Bessie had a HUGE garden, and my mom played a big role in it, also. We were just free labor, but we loved the food and ate a bit right off the plants. However, we also needed to save the various vegetables for the winter months or longer by either canning or freezing. The most important thing, other than the actual canning, was remembering to put dates on them. We usually had leftovers from year to year, so dates helped to make sure you ate the older stuff first.

Bessie was famous (at least in our minds) for her dill pickles. She never wrote down her recipe and though Kathy and others have tried to recreate it, it’s lost to history. Inset dramatic music here. 😜

Cucumbers will grow quite large and are great for salads of all kinds. However, for pickles, they need to be able to fit into a “Mason Jar.” So, some of the cucumbers would be picked at the correct “pickling” size, and Bessie would perform her voodoo pickle magic.

They were, of course, dill pickles. Who wants a sweet pickle when you can have her dill pickles? She would have some dill growing in her garden for that very purpose.

 

Most of the veggies would be frozen, but that takes up space in a freezer, and you could always lose power, and you’d be screwed. So, some of the other vegetables would also be canned in jars.
 

 
She didn’t grow a lot of fruit on the farm, but we did have a large mulberry tree that she would sometimes make jam from the berries. We would put sheets on the ground, climb the tree and shake the hell out of the branches. Only the ripened berries would fall.

 

She would trade some of her fresh vegetables with other ladies from the church for jams and jellies that they made. The barter system at its best.

Other than pickles, sweet corn required the most preparation. You had to first boil the corn just as if you wanted to have “corn on the cob.”
 
 

 
 
 

The only additional work was to cut the kernels off of hundreds of corn-cooked cobs with a nice sharp knife. The kernels would then be put into a Tupperware container, and after writing the date on the side with a marker, it was placed into the freezer. We would take a bunch of the pickles, corn and other canned goods back to Omaha.

Bessie would send us out before breakfast to collect some eggs. Let me tell you, taking a chicken’s egg can be scary. They’re usually not very happy with you. They’d start pecking at your hands or going at you with their nasty claws. Grandpa Frank would just grab them around the neck, lift them up in the air, take their eggs and put them down. No fuss.It was important to collect them as soon as they were laid. You didn’t want to crack open an egg from breakfast and have a partially developed embryo come out.

Once, Bessie let me take a couple of eggs home to see if I could get them to hatch into chicks. I had just purchased an egg incubator.

 
I placed three eggs inside and plugged in the unit. It had a small light bulb to create just enough heat to simulate a hen sitting in the nest. Every day, I would need to rotate each egg and use a flashlight behind the egg (called Candling) to see if the embryo was developing. If it wasn’t, you needed to throw it away so it wouldn’t spoil.
 

It takes 21 days for a chicken to fully form and hatch. It was very exciting to watch the baby chick start to peck its way out of the shell. Nature is very cool. You’re so tempted to just make a big hole and get the chick out. Though I did flick a few small pieces of shell off, I mostly let the little guy do his thing. Once it was out, I took it out and put it into a cardboard box with some straw and a light bulb in it to provide heat.
 
I fed it every day and quickly took it out into the backyard, where it would follow me around. We had a stone wall in the back, and I would lift up a stone, but there were almost always ants and ant eggs. It was like a smorgasbord for it. Unfortunately, the chick did not come out of the egg fully formed, and my mom told me I would need to put it down. It was the hardest thing I had to d,o but I knew it was right.

I never hatched and raised another chick.

 
 
 
I remember once finding an egg in the coop that had NO shell. Just the rubbery membrane holding the yolk and egg white. I took it home and brought it to “Show and Tell” at kindergarten that Monday. It was a big hit.

DANGER: DO NOT PROCEED if you are squeamish about furry little animals and their untimely deaths.

 
 
As recounted in several other farm stories, we raised cows. They spent a lot of their time out in the pasture around the pond doing cow things. Like tipping humans over—just kidding. One of the problems in the pasture, though, was there were a good number of holes that would be a constant battle. Walking or running cows and holes are a really bad mix. It tends to lead to broken legs and a swearing grandfather.
 
 

What the hell is causing all these holes, you ask? Cute little 13-lined ground squirrel holes were the answer. Little guys at 6.2 ounces with a talent for building big underground homes with tons of doors/entrances.

The solution? A bunch of cousins, several 5-gallon buckets filled with water and some baseball bats. The process was to find several of the holes near each other. Think of them as the front door, side door and backdoor of someone’s house. You’d pour water down several holes, and low and behold, the ground squirrels would come shooting out. Now, these things are NOT easy to hit.  One time, though, when I must have been 6 or 7 years old, a ground squirrel came shooting out and ran straight at me. I was too young to have been entrusted with a bat. I did what any 7-year-old boy would do: I reached down and grabbed it. I was holding it pretty tight because it was not even squirming. Everyone was screaming at me to let it go, so I tossed it on the ground, and it took off. I don’t recall whether it made it through the “whack-a-mole” gauntlet, but I like to think he did.

Holidays were a big thing for us on the farm. Part of it was because of tradition. Part of it was to enjoy Grandma “Bessie” Cernik’s awesome food. Lastly, it was great to see the cousins, aunts, and uncles. Bessie’s cooking was legendary, with no recipe books, just her memory, feel and taste buds to guide her. For the holidays, there was Christmas Goose and Thanksgiving Turkey, her scratch gravy, and various vegetables that were all grown in her garden during the summer and canned for later use throughout the winter. Everything seemed to be cooked in lard—yum—and, of course, there were her desserts. Kolaches with cherry, peach, poppy seed, cream and other centers. These were her main staples. She also made Rosettes with her Rosette iron, fried in lard and dipped in frosting. They were awesome.

My mom would always bring dozens of Christmas cookies, too, and the other Aunts would bring along their specialties.

 

The house was not a huge house, though it seemed pretty large to us at the time. Omaha wasn’t too far from Wahoo and the farm, so sometimes we stayed over, and other times we went back. Whenever we stayed, the youngest would have to go sleep upstairs, which had a huge feather bed, much like John Denver’s “Grandma’s Feather Bed” song. But the upstairs had NO heat. So the bed had plenty of comforters, and with 3-4 of us in bed, it stayed warm. There were bedrooms on the main floor and places to sleep in the basement.

One of the things I remember when I still believed in the Fat, Jolly Guy in the Red Suit was how some of the older cousins would sneak outside and use some sticks to draw lines in the snow that we were told were made by his sleigh.

The “Great Parachute” story is a tale that legends are made of. Okay, maybe a little dramatic. My uncle Ray was in WWII, serving in Patton’s army. He wrote a wonderful account of his amazing life, sacrifice and adventures. I took it upon myself to add a bunch of maps, photos and formatting. You can see it on this Family History website.

Growing up, we knew about Ray’s German parachute that he brought back from Germany when his unit captured the airfield at “Bad Langensalza.” One day, when ALL of the cousins were at the farm, it was brought down from the attic and taken to the pasture. I don’t remember if we still had any cows at that time but if so, they were put into the barn/corral area and locked up.

One of the older cousins strapped it on while the parachute was spread out on the field. We lifted the edges until the parachute was filled with air, and the person strapped in tried to keep it from dragging him off. If it did, a bunch of us would run ahead of the parachute and jump into it, thus deflating it and saving said cousin from the barbed wire fence.

In the meantime, someone went and fetched one of the sleds we pulled behind a tractor during the winter, which was attached to the parachute. It was thought that the ride would be way smoother and safer for the idiot, I mean cousin, doing the parachute dance.

Cousin Scott, one of Frank Cernik’s boys, jumped on the sled, ready to man up and give it a try. So, we lifted the edges of the parachute, and it caught a good amount of wind and off went Scott. What we didn’t quite calculate was the speed you would now go since the rider wasn’t using his legs to slow down. Scott went off like a rocket, and the rest of us took off to get ahead of the chute to stop its progress, thus saving him and the chute from the earlier-mentioned fence. However, though we were quick enough to collapse the chute prior to hitting the fence, we weren’t quite fast enough to do it before the chute dragged the sled with Scott hanging on for dear life right through the cow pond. Scott, much like the pond, did not smell great when he stopped. We laughed for hours after that stunt.

 

The chute is still around, and rumor has it that it’s in Cousin Chris’ attic, minus a sled.

Along one side of the barn where the outside wall meets the overhang of the roof, we had a pigeon coop. They were essentially a row of wooden boxes with a nice little opening for the pigeons to come and go. Each box had enough room for a mom and her chicks. There must have been a good dozen of more of these wooden boxes.

 

It was quite a way up a ladder to reach each box. But sometime in late spring, we would climb up to check out each box. You would reach in; the parents usually flew away. You had to be careful not that have the shit frightened out of you and fall off the ladder when they did. You would grab a young pigeon and take it out for a look. They are called “squab,” and they have yellow peach fuzz-like feathers, almost hairs, on them. The key was to get them before they were old enough to fly, but not too soon, as they would be too small. We would have them for dinner. To me, the work of getting enough to eat off of one bird was not worth the trouble. Some people swear the taste is out of this world, but for me, it was “meh.”

Just remember, before you get all emotional, most people consider pigeons to be flying rats. And there was the incident in Europe where a sick pigeon was about to crap all over Amy. I moved her out of the way only to take the full explosion from the pigeon. I had to wash my shirt in a fountain. Maybe it was karma.

We had a white poodle named Brandy, and we would sometimes take her to the farm with us. One time, one of us was up on the ladder checking out the pigeons when a young pigeon escaped and took flight. Because it was not a full-grown adult yet, it couldn’t get higher than maybe 5 feet off the ground. But it was moving way too fast for any of us to chase after it and grab it. Not to mention that it’s a bird that would simply zig and zag if we tried.

But Brandy had other thoughts. She took off straight after this pigeon. The pigeon, not having eyes in the back of its head, had no idea that Brandy was chasing it. She caught up to the pigeon and leaped into the air, snatched the pigeon, and landed on her feet. She came trotting back all happy like a hunting dog, not some sissy-ass French poodle.

Like any Midwest farm, the barn was usually the biggest, most versatile and most used building. Our barn was no different. The lower part had stalls for the cows, storage areas, a shop with all the tools and so on. The second story, or “hay loft,” was where all the hay bales (made from alfalfa) and straw from wheat. It was harvested and put up there to dry for later use in the winter to feed the cattle.

 

One day, all of the cousins were on the farm, and at some point, we went into the barn, and we climbed the stacks of hay bales on the second floor. In the front part, there was a large pile of loose hay or straw or probably both. It was at least 5 feet high. On the front wall there was a ladder that you could climb to get to a platform that was in front of a huge barn door that was currently closed. Several cousins proceeded to climb up the ladder and jump into the haystack. Lots of fun ensued, and the barn began to fill up with the usual dust.

 

Eventually, Jimmy—one of the youngest cousins—climbed up there and jumped off. And what should happen? He landed feet first directly on a pitchfork. After lots of screaming and panic, we dragged him out with one of the tongs, having gone perfectly through one of his feet. If I recall correctly, my grandfather came running from the house and proceeded to carry him back to be patched up. I don’t recall who exactly pulled the pitchfork out of his foot. How several cousins were able to jump several times without hitting the pitchfork, or how none of us saw it, is a mystery.

When I was old enough to hang out on the farm, my grandparents only raised cows and chickens. They no longer did pigs or other livestock. My mom used to tell me stories about hiding under the bed to try to avoid the sound of pigs squealing as they were rounded up.

Bessie raised chickens from little hatchlings that she bought (usually 200 or more) and raised. When they were full grown, they were “off with their heads.” It was quite the enterprise in the farm’s courtyard, and pretty much everyone participated. And grandma Bessie was in charge.

From grabbing the chickens to ensuring they were quickly “dispatched” to getting them into the boiler before plucking. I remember this machine had a big stand that held 8-10 large cans, and each can had a flame underneath it to heat up the water in each one. You’d put a chicken into each one so that they would get hot enough to make it easier to pluck the chickens but not too long to cook.

Then, she’d make sure each chicken was properly cleaned and cut up. She saved everything but the guts. We used to fight at lunch or dinner over who would get the heart or gizzards. And Grandma’s chicken noodle soup with homemade noodles was so much better because she stewed the chicken feet (minus the hard, yellow outer skin) with the soup. It sounds gross, but the chicken feet were awesome and so tender.
 
 
 
There was also the story of my mom when she was a small child. I like to call it “Marie’s Tornado Chicken.” No, this is NOT an early version of Sharknado.

The story plays out sort of like a movie.

• • • The only daughter, check.
    • On a farm, check.
    • Her pet chicken, check.
    • And a tornado, check…..

My mom (Marie) used to tell me this story. She had a pet chicken that she loved, and it used to follow her around the farmyard. I’m not sure she quite realized that it would lay some of the eggs they would pick every morning in the future. Or worse, it ends up as some chicken noodle soup.

Then, one day, a very ominous storm approached. Everyone went to the basement, which was the safest location. But I guess mom saw her pet chicken tumbling in the yard as the tornado approached. To Frank and Bessie’s surprise, Marie burst out of the house to save her pet chicken. She grabbed the chicken and huddled with it in the yard. As luck would have it (destiny maybe), the Tornado left the ground just as it approached the farm. Marie, the chicken, the farm and the family were safe.

And they had a great story to tell.

As kids, we would get yelled at for chasing the chickens around the barnyard, which is the big open area between all the buildings. But sometimes, the chickens, and especially the rooster, did the chasing. They could be quite aggressively defensive.
 
 
We would keep a few of the full-grown chickens to lay eggs.

One of our favorite buildings to play in besides Grandpa Frank’s tool shop in the barn was the Grain Storage building. This is the same building where Dale had his Corn sheller, “That Was My Hand” incident.In this case, we decided to go up into the grain storage bin on the 2nd floor. It was a huge open bin with a hole in the bottom of it. On the other side of the hole was the grain chute that the trucks could drive under.

At this particular time, soybeans were drying in this bin, as opposed to corn. This bin was probably ten feet deep and was at least 20′ x 10′ in size. And it was filled to the top with hard soybeans.

Soybeans in a large, constrained area give you some support. It’s not quite as firm as wet sand, but it’s not quicksand either. We would go up and roll around in it and act like we were sinking and shit. But we would also throw handfuls of it at each other. It would sting, but no big deal. One handful hit me in the side of the head, and I brushed it out of my hair and ear.About two weeks later, I was swimming, and some skin-like thing came out of my ear. I thought it was something that was in the pool. A few days later, I started to get an earache, which I got a lot of and still do. My mom took me to the doctor to look into my ear. He used his scope to peer in and said, “You have a bean in your ear.” He flushed my ear, and a soybean came plopping out into the pan.

Everyone was stunned and laughing, and then it all made sense.

Just like with the ground squirrel story, a lot of what drives a farmer is protecting his family and his livelihood. It’s nothing personal and is never done in malice. It’s just being very pragmatic. Mother nature often crushes you with weather or pests, and you fight back and rebuild.That’s the way it was with sparrows, rats, coyotes, chicken hawks or wasps with their nests and many other pests. My grandfather was always in a battle with many of them. The men and older grandkids would go out to hunt chicken hawks when we started losing too many chickens. And my grandmother had her nemeses also. She shot at coyotes and paid us to deal with the sparrows.

They would build their nests just about anywhere they could. They might take over part of the pigeon coop, which would mean less space for raising pigeons. They would clog up the various grain chutes needed to fill up trucks going to town to sell grain. They’d eat a lot of the grain.

She had an easy solution that would also keep us busy and allow her and Grandpa more time to do important stuff. She had a bunch of grandkids with BB Guns who liked to shoot shit. We were told to tear down their nests in buildings (the trees were off-limits) and paid us $.025 per egg and $.05 per sparrow. It was not a lot of money, but we were kids, and this was the 60s. It worked for all parties other than the birds.

Grandma Bessie LOVED her garden, and my mom inherited her green thumb. That garden provided us with fresh vegetables all summer long and into the fall. And we always had excess, which was the plan, so that we could “can” them or freeze them. This gave us veggies until the next harvest. Then it was “rinse and repeat.” There are more details in the “Canning” story.

Her garden was massive in size. It was easily 10,000 square feet. She grew sweet corn for canning and for eating on the cob. She had green beans, yellow wax beans and lima beans. She had carrots, onions and peppers of all colors. She grew potatoes up the wazoo—they stored well and lasted forever under the basement stairs—and radishes.

 

She grew cucumbers that would produce hundreds of fruits, and her dill pickles—she also grew the dill in the garden—were legendary. She grew rhubarb for pie—which I never liked. Tomatoes, celery, peas and many kinds of lettuce. A few watermelons each year to top it off. We also had a mulberry tree that we would harvest. My mom got the same green thumb as her mom, and I loved helping out in the garden. It could be hard and hot work, but I grew up with such fresh vegetables. I would often pick something and eat them right there in the garden. Even radishes after dusting off the dirt. And almost everything was canned in Mason jars or frozen to be enjoyed the rest of the year.

There was a pasture along the front road entrance to the farm. It had a small pond for the cows to drink from — though they had much cleaner water by the barn — or roll in to cool down. We would spend time down there collecting frogs or tadpoles. It also played a major role in the “Parachute” story above.
 
 

There was one time when the four youngest of us Smith brothers captured dozens of tadpoles and put them into a large, clear plastic bottle of some sort. We begged our mom to let us take them home to raise them into frogs, maybe sell them or some other such nonsense. She let us. A few days later, we realized that we were idiots and decided to get rid of them. We couldn’t dump them down the toilet, and there were no ponds, streams, or lakes close enough for us to go to. So, we decided to pour them down a storm drain that collected rainwater from our back porch and then ran under the house addition that was added several years earlier. It emptied out the other side of our house and went into a small concrete ditch/gutter that fed stormwater between our house and our neighbor’s house down to the street.

We quickly forgot about them and their poor, meager lives. About ten weeks later, I was mowing the front lawn and saw some tiny frogs hopping down the ditch/gutter. I followed them to where the pipe came out from under our house, and dozens of baby frogs were emerging out of the pipe. Evidently, there was enough water in a low spot under the house drainpipe to allow the tadpoles to complete their cycle and become frogs.

Idiots 0, Frogs 1

Another pond story revolves around a very hot day and four of us younger Smith boys. We spent the day doing various things we often did around the farm — chores, hunting, building crap, breaking crap and getting all sweaty. One of us decided that it was a good idea to go for a swim in the pond to cool off, though we had never done so before. But we didn’t have any swimsuits, and we sure weren’t going to go skinny dipping. We weren’t complete morons.

What to do? We stripped down to our “tighty-whities” and jumped in. After some time and lots of splashing, wrestling and other crap, we crawled out and realized that our “undies” were not even close to being white anymore. They were sort of a mud-colored grey. And our bodies weren’t much better. We sheepishly went up to the house where our mom was waiting. She was pissed, to say the least. She made us go into the front yard, where she proceeded to hose us down at full pressure with REALLY cold water. We never did that again.

Idiots 0, Mom 1

 
Whenever we were on the farm, someone would want one of the older cousins—or whomever grandpa allowed to drive his tractor around—to take kids on a tractor ride. But if there was snow, it was a whole different ballgame. Usually, around Christmas time, all of the Cernik/Smith clans would gather at the farm. Grandma “Bessie” Cernik’s cooking was legendary, with no recipe books, just her memory, feel and taste buds to guide her. But more of that is in the Holidays Stories page.On many of those Holiday visits, we were lucky enough to have some snow. We would grab all of the sleds we had around the farm and attach them by rope to the back of the tractor. It was usually three sleds, maybe four. Anymore, and you risked major collisions between the sled riders. The tractor wasn’t built for top speed, but it had great traction and was fast enough. Going around a corner usually resulted in someone being tossed from a sled. I don’t recall any broken bones or bloody clothes, just lots of fun and cold kids when all done.

Growing up our grandparents grew an assortment of crops. Cousin Steve, the oldest cousin, remembers them growing corn, wheat, milo (sorghum), alfalfa (purple flowering plant in the legume family like clover) and occasionally oats. Sometime after Steve’s family moved to Florida our grandparents switched away from oats, while keeping the others, and over to soybeans. I’m sure it was part financial and part crop rotation.

Both milo (think bird seed) and soybean fields are ripe for tall growing weeds. Corn less so since it grows so tall and doesn’t leave a lot of sun for anything else. The price that a farmer gets for a bushel of grain is impacted by the amount of foreign matter. More weed seeds in it, less dollars per bushel.

In order to prevent that, farmers will hire young pups such as us to walk the fields with a machete to chop down any tall weeds. One needs to make sure the weed falls to the ground so that it is below the combine forks. But also, to not cut down the actual crop. Bad for business.

The fields that we walked were 1/2-mile fields. You’d walk 1/2 mile chopping as you go and then you’d reach the end. You would then step all of about 3 feet to the next row and walk back in the other direction for another 1/2-mile walk.

• • Rinse and repeat.
  • All day long.
  • In the sun.
  • Uphill both ways (OK that part was a lie).

Walking Soybean fields wasn’t too bad, just hot and boring. But Milo (grain sorghum) fields were a whole different ballgame. Milo looks a lot like corn stalks with their broad but sharp leaves, only shorter. They come up a little higher than your waste. We usually walked the field in short sleeve shirts because it was hot. However, as you walked milo the leaves would brush against your arms a cut the hell out of them. And the nice salty sweat would roll right into those fresh cuts and rest is doesn’t need much of an explanation. It hurt.