It must be Friday and ….
It must be Friday and time to start another column. I say, must be, as another “fastest hour of the month” just finished. I’d brought a copy of my column along that I’d written about Dick Hinke from Jim Falls. He is the singer/accordian player and sang his song about the Owen Hill. He got a big kick out of it.
I’m calling this a special day. It has been 100 days since I came and my mind hasn’t changed a bit. Why should it? I don’t have a worry in the world. Except I wish they’d quit trying to feed me broccoli.
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This has been quite a week. Farm Tech Days are over, that is if it dries out enough to get things out of there. Monday afternoon was another historic event for Loyal with the ribbon cutting for the Mack School at the Loyal Museum.
Besides witnessing an historic event I can say I lost four pounds. I thought the day would be fine if I could find enough shade. I found the shade just fine, but the heat and humidity gave me mixed emotions about whether it was the right thing to do.
I’ve always felt bad as I never could say I attended a one-room school. The Pipe Lake School was a two-room school and fire had destroyed the old school. The new one was built in 1915, so it was fairly new when I started school in 1936.
Now they are saying it is a hundred years old, yet the building hasn’t been changed that much, especially the outside. In 1972, a man from Germany, Manfred Schonover, landed in Minneapolis, and I’m not sure what he had in mind. What developed was a place to hold boogie night music and a place to teach music. So he bought the old Pipe Lake School. You can find him on Facebook, just look for Pipe Dreams.
The interior hasn’t changed much either as the huge sliding doors between the two rooms are still there, along with the huge windows. He has converted the basement, which is only partially in the grounds into his living quarters. As a kid the school served as a community center so it had a nice kitchen. The other side was kind of a work room where the boys did handy craft projects. I remember building a bluebird house out of a piece of hollow log. It won me a first prize, an Eversharp pencil from the Farmers Union group that met there. I should have known better than carrying it all the time. I dropped it in the pig pen and they ate it.
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The other school in the township, the A.P. Holst School, was just one room. A man by the name of Paul Anderson bought it and remodeled it to live in. At the time, he started making maple syrup and today his son and grandson have continued the development which makes it possible for you to buy Anderson Maple Syrup in the grocery stores.
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There are a couple more stories I can tell about the Pipe Lake School and all the country schools. My cousin’s wife did a history of all the rural schools in Polk County. One of the interesting things she included were the state blueprints for building outdoor toilets. I remember them well.
The boys sat just off the corner on one side of the school and the girls on the other.
The other story is a sad one. It happened after I was already out of high school and working at the Turtle Lake Times newspaper. The owner still lived on their farm out in the Pipe Lake area and was on the school board. On this day he was out helping with repairs on the well.
I don’t know for sure what they were doing, but a well company was called to fix the well. In the course of their work they were pulling up the well pipes. They had them up quite a ways, to the point they got top heavy and started to fall. My boss let go, but the two well guys hung on and the pipe tipped, hitting the power line and they both were killed.
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I saw something the other day that makes Wisconsin such a good place to live. We don’t have sharks. I think the article said Long Island in New York and Florida are the most dangerous places to be in the water. We had a few people at Port Aransas, that got beaten, but not so serious as to losing an arm or leg.
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Remember me telling all the good things I found on my computer, just by playing around? Well this made big news in 1930. The most common boy’s name that year was Robert. When I was growing up I always went by Robert as our neighbor’s son was called Bob.
We also had an old neighbor, Robert Johnson. I don’t know how old he was, but he was bed ridden as long as I knew him. I never knew why but Mom always made me stop and see him every once in a while. I did, but it wasn’t a highlight in my life. He lived with his son and daughter. Johnny was an alcoholic and was probably the worst farmer around. It did work pretty well as their land and ours next to it across the fence was always a good example of how important manure and fertilizer was for crops. Hilda would rank right up there as the world’s worst housekeeper.
There are a couple more Bob stories out there. It is my understanding my son-in-law was called Rupe, because there were two other Roberts, so one was Robert, one was Bob and the teacher decided to call him Ruppert.
I don’t remember what was going on in Loyal one year, but I, Bob Tesch and Bob Meyer were on the committee. We didn’t worry as we figured if something went wrong we’d just say it was Bob’s fault.
There was an organization one time called Bob, Inc. I don’t know what they did and I never found out. Florence laid her foot down and said it would just be a waste of money to join.
There was one time when I became a little famous. That was when Bob Bergland of Minnesota was named the Secretary of Agriculture. He was Norwegian and used an “a” instead of a “u”. It didn’t matter much when people would call me the secretary of agriculture, I just explained I was the real one.
