just a tish NE of central ND | Im going to add things from my lifetime and my dad's life to this thread. My parents both went through the depression years on farms too. I remember my mother talking of shocking wheat in the fields barefoot because some of the 14 kids didn't have shoes for the summers. Dad spoke of collecting cow chips fot eh stove to burn instead of coal. Those had to be tuff times.
Remodeling buildings mean tearing apart other buildings and replacing the wood with wood from other torn down buildings. Reusing windows..... reusing old light fixtures and some light fixtures. reusing the ridge caps. The laths were bundled up and saved for 40 years. Burying electrical wires across the yard meant digging the trench by hand with a pick and shovel to lay the cables in. Mixing cement was with a portable mixer, powder, and sand, rock and water with a shovel and wheelbarrow. In the 50 years I knew my dad, I didn't know there was such a thing as new roll of barbed wire or electric fence wire and only the neighbors had new posts, Ours were mostly salvaged from somewhere off of someone that died and sold out. Gas tank hoses were spliced, potato sacks were repurposed ad re-used. Seed came out of our farm bins. Fertilizer was manure only. Tires...I didn't know they even made new tires that would fit on light implements and rakes or mowers, plows and grain augers. (all used car throw off tires) Hitch pins were made from bolts and shafts. Welding was fixing. Nothing wrong with that. Plastic bags came for bread later in life. Clothes were hung in the house to dry in the coal stove days. At one time bread bags meant a bag for the homemade bread. The bag was salvaged out of the old used up milk dispenser containers at school. Washed and rewashed. Drill disc scraper were taken off and welded up. The slides on the NH chain baler were taken off and welded up. The floor chain sere taken off and the waring part of the chain beneath the hook had a piece of rod welded on each section on both sides. The floor was a patch over the hole. Broken mower guards were cut in half and the two good halves welded back together to make a new one. We sharpened serrated sickle sections to reuse. The wooden grainers were covered with coffee can tin and license plate tin patches. Old water tanks and barrels were where leftover seed from the bottoms of the grain drill were kept for next year. Feed pail were metal 2-D cans with the metal top removed and fence staples brazed on to attach wire for handles. There was hand braided used baler twine ropes used for stuff here. I have swing gates made out of old dump rake wheels and angle iron. Ladders made for feeder chain slats. Old plow shares were welding iron. In my dad's whole lifetime, I remember one new mower sickle and it hung on the hop rafters his whole life unused as he fixed up and welded up his old sickles and bought old ones on auction sales. I do remember he made a 4 bottom packer and pony drill into a wider 5 bottom packer and drill in the 70's. Spliced 2 drills and packers together to add on a foot on the end. He did such good job that most people didn't even know the difference when they looked. I remember he made his 5-wheel farmhand wheel rake into a 7-wheel model with pipe and a welder. We had 1 bigger hydraulic cylinder that got moved from chisel, to the plow, to cultivator, to harrow to the disc, to the corn chopper. Yep, Only one hydraulic cylinder.
There are so many more memories like this that I don't have time to list them all and never would have remembered them all anyways.. But I am still thankful for the way we lived and learned and saved to make things work. I have learned how to do many things and help myself and my children all have inherited the same benefit of being able to problem solve and make things and make them work... Growing up poor isn't all bad. Its growing up stupid and helpless that gets people into trouble in life.
>>Rest in peace dear old dad.... He would have been 102 years old yesterday on ST. Patty's day!
Edited by School Of Hard Knock 3/18/2025 21:29
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Any one else’s dad as cheap as mine?
