I vaguely remember the light of kerosene lamps. My memory is that it was like the light of a fireplace, subdued and warm, but steady and circular. I also remember bathing in a round steel tub. I also remember the dread of the outhouse and the fear that my behind would be bitten by a spider or a snake. I would hold all in until there was absolutely no option. Although we lived near a major city in Texas, electricity was not available until a government-funded program entitled rural electrification started our life to change dramatically with electricity. At first it was only lighting that changed. Then further changes occurred. Now we were kind of in the 20th century, not financially, but a little bit psychologically. My father now listened to the market reports on cattle prices. We were still milking cows and that was our funding to pay property taxes and buy coffee, sugar, and white flour. In addition my mother bought store-bought bread. I visited another German family next to us and that family had freshly-baked, white flour bread every day. It was so good compared to the store-bought bread and I begged my mother to bake bread, but she never did. I also remember vaguely the model-T Ford rushing off when my father's father was on his deathbed with my father rushing to get a doctor.
Although my father was a veteran US soldier in World War I, he understood the discrimination against German immigrants, so we were never taught German. We were only to speak English and therefore later on, entering the main stream city school when Texas "consolidated" the school system and required the one-teacher to all the grades to all eventually close, I could appear to be one of the sophisticated city people, i.e., white middle class, as compared to the German peers I abandoned now in my flight toward social acceptance and eventually the city. My German-immigrant peers with their German accents could not flourish as I did in social acceptance.
Prior to the county seat city school, my social life was only that of city (and really hated) cousins whose parents appeared like a plague every weekend and, at school, the other children of the surrounding farm families. Every weekend the brothers and sisters of my mother would appear, particularly during hunting season. My father endured them, sometimes getting a bit of work out of them, but not much. My mother fed them graciously from our numerous provisions toiling through 3 meals a day with the city females gossiping and rarely lifting a hand to help. The males hunted deer to provide their families with meat.
As the nearby small town, attracted more residents, the property taxes increased. My parents had to tell the maternal siblings that they would have to charge a fee for hunting to cover the increased property taxes. All but one drove off in a huff and never returned. The remaining brother of my mother agreed to pay and to find another hunter that would also pay so we survived the increasing taxes, not on the production of food, but on the urge of the urban male to maintain his manhood. It is still the same today in most of the Texas ranch families, unless they sit on oil or gas.
Growing up my mother related that rarely was her birth family able to go to bed with a full stomach unless the nearby grandmother yelled to come to supper. What was the problem with food then?--alcoholism in the maternal family with no ability to go to the now ever-present aids of Alcoholics Anonymous. The problem was hidden and the children went hungry.
My father had to quit school at 4th grade because his labor was needed on his father's ranching. But he loved learning and our house was filled with some books, including a very basic dictionary. He subscribed to numerous magazines. Much later, he subscribed to the first issues of Rodale's first publication. My mother was amazed that garden soil had to be replenished. We were fed on her garden for all of us on soil that was essentially subsoil. In spite of that, I don't remember the challenges that face the gardener today, i.e., plagues of disease and insects. It was my job to water the garden, moving the hose from one row to the next and repair the irrigation ditches beside the rows. Although we could play, my sister and I, we also had a daily load of chores that enabled us to eat, including watering and weeding the garden, gathering eggs, and going to pasture to bring in the herd of Jersey cows for milking.
When the great economic forces wanted the food industry, they started by forcing all the small dairy farms out of business by buying the legislature and passing capital-intensive production requirements, so we no longer could make a living selling cream to the city creamery and the milk to the calves for eventual sale. My father began buying registered Hereford bulls because he could not afford to replace his Jersey cows. Over the years, all his cattle looked Hereford except for a few aged Jerseys that still survived after the changeover. During the transition, he had to constantly monitor the birthing of the calves, due to the threat of natural birthing failing because of the slightly larger size of the Hereford males compared to the Jersey males causing calves too large for easy births.
I recall my father discussing the needs of the beef consumer and how they wanted the meat to be fat and then later on, when the desires changed, the lack of surrounding fat, but fat dotted throughout the animals muscle tissue. As his were all grass-fed beef except for winter feeding of oats, his cattle sold anyways without the requirements. Now I know he was feeding the feedlot industry, but we knew nothing of it back then.
I remember him talking about Earl Butz but I can't remember what he was saying about him, but he talked about him a lots. Speculating now, I expect he was fearing that somehow the agricultural powers would eliminate his present method of feeding his family as they did his previous method.
So as my elder sisters married and went off to the wonderful city, I was left on the farm alone with 2 old parents and dreams of the future. I was successful in many ways in the city school I attended, hiding my own father's alcoholism, my family's extreme poverty, my mother's increasing depression, and my envy of the comfortable lifestyle I saw my sister's lives. But still as a child with the first sister married and my sister and I making a vacation week of staying with that sister, we got the real first taste of something now called suburbia. As we walked through the vast acreages of lush, green, frequently watered lawns, my older sister was awed. I thought it was a terrible waste. My sister said that we were going to have a lawn at home with that green grass. I looked at her and said, "Are you crazy, you can't eat it!" I am afraid I have never changed from that child even when I entered the 20th century at the age of 18 when I became a college student, the first one in my family to be one. I went there to start my life in the 20th century and all I ever wanted to be was a farmer. Mind you, not a farmer's wife as I saw that lifestyle, I wanted to be a farmer, but women were not farmers, only farmer's wives, with endless 24/7 toil and nothing but tears and too many babies to show for it and the ever-resent fear of another mouth to feed.
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