That Was My Hand

That Was My Hand!!!

It was the summer of 1967 or 1968, and we spent some of the summer on the farm as usual. The four youngest had spent the day doing normal farm stuff—building and breaking stuff, fighting, maybe shooting our BB Guns and riding bikes. We also looked for sparrow nests, but that’s a story on the Farm Stories page.

Grain Storage

One of the buildings on the farm was the Grain and Equipment Storage Building. It was two to three stories tall and had a Corn drying shed as part of it. There were most likely soybeans at the time in the storage bay on the second floor.

Grain Chute

We were in the bottom, which had a concrete pad where you could drive a truck through doors on each side of the building.

This allowed a truck to park underneath the bay, with a small chimney/chute-like door in the ceiling. The chute connected to the bottom of the bin where all the grain was. Thus, the grain could be dried up above and then dumped into the truck for sale.

The other part of the building contained a “corn shed” on the first floor. It was more open from the inside to allow some airflow for field corn’s “whole” ears to dry out.

Ears of dried field corn

Metal Corn Sheller

On that bottom floor, there was a manually operated metal corn sheller. A person would place a dried ear of corn in the hole on the top. Inside the sheller were spikes on one side that didn’t move, and on the other was a metal disk with its own set of spikes. When someone turned the crank, the disk would spin, and the dried corn would be torn off the cob. The dried kernels would pour out of a hole at the bottom, and the empty cob would do the same. We located some random dried ears of corn in the corn shed and proceeded to feed them into the contraption and crank away.

After several ears were done, one of them was stuck on the inside. Dale decided to stick his hand down the opening in the top to dislodge the stuck ear of corn. Unfortunately, due to a total lack of communication, Brian turned the crank. While it didn’t last long, there ended up being a LOT of blood and one mangled hand.

We ran to the house, and Dale was taken to the Hospital. They sent him to Omaha, where a surgical hand specialist was called in. I believe Dale had over 100 stitches used to reconnect everything. Luckily, all his fingers were still there. He still has the nasty scars on his hand, but it never kept him from full function. He was VERY lucky, and we caught a LOT of shit for that incident.