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East of Broken Bow | Went to grade school where all the kids carried a lunch box. I had to make the plastic sandwich bag last all week (as did a few of the other kids) We celebrated Friday, by popping the bags and throwing them away. Also, Ziplock bags were for the Rockefellers, we had to use the bags that had the little flap that you folded over and tucked in to hold your sandwich in.
I can remember one time dad sent my brother and I to town with the pickup for an errand. This was a pickup that was bought new, but had zero luxuries, not even a radio. It did have a heater, but that was all. Anyway, the windshield wipers were so bad we could barely see when it started raining, so we stopped and got the cheapest wiper blade refills we could find, I think they were like 89 cents for the pair, and we stood out in the rain threading the little insert into the wiper bodies. When we got home, we got chewed out that we should have put only one new one on the driver's side, and the better of the used ones on the passenger side. My brother protested that the inserts came in pairs, and was told that we could have saved it in the glovebox for the next time we needed wiper blades.
We only had maybe one good set of implement tires. Put the good tires on the soil mover early in the spring (2 wheeled 1/5 yard) to clean ditches, took them off and put them on the disk (one 'good' one, and another that held air on each side), got done disking and put the good tires on the silage cutter in the fall, and then a wagon after that when we went to picking. It was a calamity if a wagon tire blew at the end of harvest because then dad had to buy a tire to use for only a few days and then it would sit until spring.
On the flip side, dad always treated all of us fairly, and with love, and actually gave us more luxuries than he ever gave himself. If we sold hogs and they brought over a price he mentioned before we left home, whatever kids that helped sort/load could get an ice cream if we rode to the sale barn with him. Dad was born in the Great Depression, and most of my early memories were during the farm crisis in the 80s, so I have to say dad had seen some tough times. | |
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Any one else’s dad as cheap as mine?
