The following spring, the family migrated across Iowa with a team and covered wagon headed for the Platte Valley around Fremont. In camp one night in Iowa, my grandfather heard a familiar laugh and gold my grandmother, "that has got to be Riley Hart", a friend he had met in the Union Army. They had a good visit during which Riley talked my grandfather into changing his plans. He decided to go to the Logan Valley instead of the Platte Valley.
It was there, three miles north of Lyons, Nebraska that
grandfather homesteaded a farm. One of the assets was a beautiful
eighty acre "clear lake". My father used to tell of the wonderful
fishing and hunting on this lake. The Omaha Indians used to come down
to the lake to hunt and fish. Several times they would leave a
home-made canoe on the lake which my dad would enjoy for hunting and
fishing. On cold days some of the Indians would come to my
grandfather's house and would want to come in to get warm. One day,
one of the Indians stood too close to the stove and his fur coat began
to smoke. He would not believe it until my dad pushed the coat over
against his leg. He said, "Ugh!", but he moved away from the stove.
My grandfather told of an incident that happened one summer night
when my dad was herding cattle in the tall prairie grass. The cattle
had to be herded because there were no fences. One of those days he
saw a deer. He tried to maneuver his pony so he could get a good shot
at the deer, but the deer kept out of range and headed north (toward
where the town Rosalie was later built). Finally, he got a shot at
the deer, but missed, and his pony promptly threw him off. Dad could
get to the pony's tail but could not catch him, and he had to follow
the pony all the way home on foot!
The beautiful clear lake lasted for a number of years. But as
the surrounding land was homesteaded and the farmers plowed the land,
topsoil washed down the hillsides and into the lake. Later, about
1909, a ditch district was formed and the Logan creek channel was
changed to run right down through the lake.
Grandfather had sold the homestead prior to this time and had
purchased a farm seven miles northeast of Lyons. He later sold this
farm and moved to Lyons, where he started a business buying hogs and
cattle from farmers. When he got enough for a carload, he would ship
them to the Omaha market. He didn't like the cold winters in
northeast Nebraska, and finally bought a farm near Elk City, Oklahoma
where he spend the rest of his life. He and grandmother always came
back to Lyons for a visit during the summer.
I wasn't very old when I went out to the hay field with my dad
where the hired men were stacking hay. I went with one of them who
was driving a team of horses on a sweep. He took a chew of tobacco
and, of course, offered me a chew. I promptly took it, chewed it for
awhile, and swallowed it -- but not for long. I threw up everything.
That ended my career of chewing tobacco. To this day it makes me sick
if I even smell chewing tobacco.
I remember a few other incidents when we lived on the
reservation. For instance, the time a salesman drove into our yard,
and I went into the corn crib where I was sure he couldn't see me.
However, he came right over to the corncrib and gave me a small memo
book through one of the cracks of the corncrib wall. Another time
"Sopo Gogee", an Indian, was visiting with my dad, and when he decided
to leave he said, "I take this boy with me". I promptly replied,
"I'll give you a nickel if you don't". Then I remember my Uncle Hans
Hansen and Aunt Carrie. They lived about a mile west of us. One
Sunday we were walking over to their place for Sunday dinner. I was
walking along, with my dad holding my hand, and my brother, Orville,
started to run down the hill. My dad cautioned him not to run too
fast as he might fall. It happened. He fell and slid on his stomach,
getting his clothes all dirty.
Later on we had scarlet fever at our house. Living twelve miles
from town, it was hard to get a doctor. We lost Orville with scarlet
fever that winter of 1901. As I remember he was about seven years
old. I had it very bad also, but Uncle Hans and Aunt Carrie took me
to their house as my mother was sick too.
Uncle Hans and Aunt Carrie came over from Denmark and farmed for
several years. After some time they sold out and moved back to
Denmark. He had made enough money to buy a small farm and make their
living quite comfortable. Uncle Hans passed away at the beginning of
World War I, but Aunt Carrie lived a number of years after. After
Uncle Hans had passed away, my mother, her sister Christine, and Uncle
Pete Brix offered to pay her way back to the United States. However,
the Danish government would not let her take her money out of Denmark.
My sister was four years older than I. So I do not remember much
about her school days at our country school. I do remember that when
she was in the eighth grade, some boys came by the school with a bob
sled pulled by four head of mules. They took some kids to their home
about a mile east of the school. Of course, I went along. By the
time we got back to our home, I had frostbitten feet.
Later in February of 1909, Hazel was bothered with goiter, a
swelling of glands. She had been taking medicine for this but was not
too bad off. The first part of March, she stayed home from school,
not feeling too well. On Wednesday night my father brought some
oysters home for oyster stew for supper. We all enjoyed them, but
after supper Hazel complained of stomach pains. My parents called the
doctor. He was very busy and did not come until Saturday morning, and
Hazel was in a coma. She passed away that morning March 6, 1909. The
doctor diagnosed her illness as acute indigestion. I am sure it was
nothing more than a ruptured appendix.
We lived on the edge of a Danish settlement. Every fourth of
July, they would have a Danish picnic. All of the women would bring a
picnic dinner for their own family. My mother used to fix new
potatoes creamed, fried chicken, and peas or beans fresh from the
garden. It was very tasty. Of course, the men would chip in and buy
several kegs of beer. They would always get a few too many kegs. So
about a week after the fourth, they would have another "beer drink".
For fear they wouldn't have enough, they would always order a few more
kegs. The kegs were kept in a horse water tank with large chunks of
ice to keep them cool.
When I was about five years old, my father purchased an eighty
acre farm three and a half miles east and one and a half miles north
of Lyons, Nebraska. My dad had an original idea about eliminating the
so-called hog yard and started raising pigs out in the pasture. This
eliminated a lot of sicknesses common to pigs. He had a system of
using an A-framed hog house and would locate a group of four houses in
one corner of the field with about twenty-five sows. When the pigs
were born, that group would be fed and remain in their area until the
pigs would weight eighty to one hundred pounds. The next group of
sows would be moved to another corner of the field and be treated in
the same manner. Incidentally, the forty acre field would be planted
in alfalfa. When an area became contaminated, we would simply move
the A-frame hog house a short distance to a new clean area. I will
never forget how the little pigs would play when we moved them. It
was apparent that they enjoyed the new area and clean alfalfa. They
would run in circles and roll over and over in the alfalfa. He
usually kept about one hundred sows. As the four groups of
twenty-five each and their pigs reached the eighty to one-hundred
pound weight, we would feed them in one common area. My father would
sort out about one-hundred sows from all the pigs raised which would
total around six hundred. All the rest of them would be grown and
fattened to around two-hundred-twenty-five pounds and shipped to the
various markets.
Then there were the chickens he raised. He used the same tactics
with them as he did with the pigs. That is, he raised them out in the
fresh, clean fields. First, however, he bought enough incubators to
hatch about three thousand chickens in one batch. Then, as they began
to grow, he would take them to the field. He used the same type of
A-frame houses. We mixed several kinds of ground food, such as ground
wheat, corn and other grains, along with some meat scraps, as they
were commonly called. They were all white leghorn chickens, and it
was quite a sight to see all those chicken running around in the
field. The hens would be sorted out to use for laying. The balance,
young roosters and some of the culls of the hens, would be shipped to
the market in Omaha as chicken fryers.
His system of handling the laying hens was to line up six or
eight of the A-shaped buildings and put 100 to 150 hens in each
building. They were fed a mixed feed which we would buy at the Lyons
roller mill in separate sacks containing ground wheat, corn, etc., and
we would hand mix it in a mining bin which we made for this purpose.
Water was supplied to the chickens by a small open trough which
extended clear through all of the chicken houses. Water was supplied
from a tank at the high end of the houses by means of a small
trickling stream down through the open trough. Clean wheat straw was
placed in each chicken house for the purpose of cleanliness. We would
feed them wheat and oats scattered over the straw and mixed up, so
that the hens would have a natural place to scratch the straw to get
the oats and wheat. This straw was removed regularly as it became
dirty and was replaced with clean straw. The eggs were gathered
daily. My dad started some of the earliest sales of fresh eggs packed
in twelve-egg cartons. He purchased white cartons with a blue lining.
We would sort and clean eggs in the evening. In the morning, when I
was going to high school in Lyons, I would take a case of 30 dozen
carton-packed eggs to the depot for express shipment to Sumner
Brothers grocery in Omaha. Customers of Sumner Brothers were pleased
and happy to get such fresh eggs which were sealed and guaranteed
gathered fresh daily. Every other day, I would take an extra 30 dozen
cases of the culled eggs, but they were shipped to the open market.
The first year that I went to school in Lyons was in eighth
grade. I had several methods of transportation. I rode a bicycle, a
pony, or, at times, drove the pony hitched to single-seated buggy.
When I was eight years old, my dad took me into Miss Fritts, a piano
music teacher, and I started taking piano lessons. This I continued
all through high school. Very few boys took piano lessons. I was so
embarassed when Miss Fritts had a piano recital, and I was the only
boy in a class of twenty or thirty pupils. The piano has been a real
amusement to me all through the years.
While in high school, when I was a junior, I was next in line to
be the piano player, since the two previous players graduated when I
was a sophomore. They were Edith Douglas and Amy Eckleen -- both very
accomplished pianists. So while a junior, I played the piano for the
assembly singing from 9:00 to 9:15 a.m. Also during the junior and
senior years the school put on a musical cantata, and I had the
privilege to play for them. It was lots of fun. Then there was
Silvia and the Belle of Barnstapoole, but I'll have to elaborate on
the story at a later date, if I get the time.
My dad set me up quite a schedule when I was going to school in
Lyons during my eighth grade. We lived five miles from town, so I had
to rise in the morning at 5:00 a.m. First I had to do my regular
chores, which consisted of feeding the horses and milking two or three
cows. Next, I came into breakfast and had to be ready to leave for
school at 7:30. I would arrive at the school in Lyons at 8:30. so I
was never late. My dad thought that since I had such a rigorous
schedule, I should have a hot noon meal. In those days, there were
rooming and boarding places in most small towns. We found Mrs. Carr
who agreed to have me for noon dinner for twenty-five cents per meal.
Every Friday I paid Mrs. Carr a silver dollar and twenty-five cents.
My days in high school were more or less routine. I did not have
any trouble with school work. Some times I would have some home work
, and I always had piano practice in the evening. Generally we
retired at 9 p.m. Incidentally, through the four years of high school
I was fortunate enough to have had the highest grades. In other
words, I was the valedictorian. Also I had the leading part in our
senior high school play at the town auditorium. There were ten girls
and six boys in our class and we graduated in 1915.
I did not go to the university in the fall of 1915 because my dad
needed my help on the farm, but by the fall of 1916 my parents and I
decided I should go to the university. I attended the College of
Agriculture at the University of Nebraska (it is now called the East
Campus). When I arrived in Lincoln, my cousin's husband, Lloyd Hart,
met me at the depot. We had dinner at his fraternity house. There
again I had the pleasure of playing the piano for all the boys to sing
after dinner. I stayed with Lloyd and my cousin, Olive Hart, for the
first several months of my time in Lincoln. Later I moved nearer the
East Campus because Lloyd and Olive lived in the south part of
Lincoln, and I had to take street cars out to the Ag College. This
was difficult during the cold winter months. During the first
semester of 1917, the Nebraska Farmer came out with a contest for
College of Ag students to write up an original idea letter. I chose
to write about my father's idea of raising pigs out in the field
rather than in a hog yard. The first prize was won by a senior, and
second prize by a junior, and I won the third prize as a freshman.
I came home for the Christmas Holidays in 1916, and on January 1,
1917, I was invited to go to a dance at the Danish Hall which was
located just north of a country store called Basford. One of the
girls at that dance was later to become my wife. Nobody offered to
introduce me to her, and I never met her during the entire evening.
Somehow it did something to me when I saw her dancing with those young
gentlemen (dumb jerks, I thought), but then I thought about going back
to Lincoln where I had dates with a banker's daughter and then there
was the preacher's daughter too.
My school work was more or less routine. I did not have any
problem with my grades. I made several tours to various places in
Lincoln. One day in December of 1916, I and several boys went on a
tour of the penitentiary -- by the cells and into the dining room. We
were very impressed by what we saw. Finally at the end of the tour,
our guide said to us, "I received the best Christmas present one could
get. I got a pardon yesterday, and I will be leaving next week". We
were all flabbergasted. We never dreamed of his being an inmate.
I was invited to a number of fraternity houses for dinner. They
all wanted me to join their fraternity. However, my parents did not
approve of fraternities, so I never joined. I did have the pleasure
of playing the piano for 20 or 30 boys to sing, and it was lots of
fun. There were very few boys who were able to play the piano then.
I also had the pleasure of playing the piano for an orchestra at the
University. We played on various occasions.
My college days were soon to end. My cousin, Harry Brix, came
down to visit for a few days in the spring of 1917 about the time
World War I was expanding. When he went home, he told his parents
that I was going to enlist in the army, which was untrue. They
promptly told my parents. My father immediately called me on the
telephone requesting that I come home at once. So that ended my
college days. Besides, he needed me to help on the farm. I helped
put in the crops, such as planting straight corn rows. Also during
the summer, threshing time arrived. I spent many days that summer
trading work with neighbors hauling grain bundles of oats, barley or
wheat to the threshing machine. Many days I worked until almost dark
to complete some neighbor's threshing. Of course, when it came our
turn to thresh, the neighbors came to help us.
On September 1, 1917, I went to a dance with my cousin at the
Lawless Barn Dance, which was a well-known dance hall. It was there
that I met my future wife, Margaret Connealy. After several dances, I
asked for a date for the next date to go to Lake Quinnabaugh, a lake
southeast of Decatur. She consented to the date. In the meantime, my
cousin came to me and asked me to take another girl home, so he could
take her friend home. Being a sort of kind-hearted person, I agreed
to that. Then when it came time to leave, Margaret could not find her
coat. I helped look for it. I wanted her to go before I left with
another girl. We found the coat and Margaret and her brothers left
before I did. The girl was a friend of Margaret's -- a fact I didn't
know at the time.
We had our first date on the Sunday. After that I seemed somehow
to maneuver a date each Saturday thereafter. One day in December,
1917, we came home from the movies in Decatur. I let Margaret out at
her home, and I started on home. About a mile from her house, I ran
out of gas. I walked to a neighbor's house, awakened the man, and got
five gallons of gas from him. I noticed the engine ran like it was
choking on gasoline and I drove only two miles further and was out of
gasoline again. Apparently, a small pin had come out of the lever
controlling the float in the carburetor. This time I was only about a
mile from my uncle's home. I walked on to their house. They did not
hear me come in and were surprised to see me on their couch when they
arose in the morning. I went home from there the next morning and
drove back to our car. I drove to the first farm house and put the
car in their garage. I removed the carburetor and took it to Lyons to
our dealer. The mechanics replaced the pin that controlled the
floater. I took it back out to the car and replaced the carburetor.
Then when I tired to start it, I found one of the children had turned
the switch on in our car and the battery had run down. I removed the
battery and took it to Lyons to be recharged. This took a couple of
days. I picked it up, drove back to the car, replaced the battery,
started the car and headed for home. My father had come with me that
day, so he drove the truck home. I got down the road about a half
mile, and the car stopped. I could not start it and discovered that
the distributor cap had a crack in it. I started to walk home through
a former friend's yard, and he loaned me his Ford car. I drove on
home, took our Ford truck, drove to Lyons, got a new distributor cap,
returned home, picked up the borrowed Ford car, and drove back towards
our car. Lo and behold, I had a blowout on one of the front tires.
He and I put a repair boot in it, pumped it up, and finally, I got to
the car and replaced the distributor cap. The car was started, and I
drove on home. It took two weeks and fifty gallons of gasoline to get
that car home.
Needless to say, my Saturday night dates were made with the Ford
truck on a couple of Saturdays during that period. This did not stop
my asking for dates on Saturday nights. Later dates were increased to
include Wednesday nights and finally included all day Sunday as well
as Sunday night. Margaret and I had a very pleasant courtship which
finally concluded with our wedding on April 5, 1920. We went to Omaha
on our honeymoon where we saw the wonderful stage play, The Bird of
Paradise. Upon our return home we moved into the farm house where my
parents and I had lived. My parents had purchased a home in Lyons and
had moved there before we were married.
I farmed with my father for several years thereafter. My father
had always been very progressive, having purchased some of the first
tractors that had been made. Finally he purchased a Caterpillar
tractor to do the heavy farm work. It was quite an attraction. All
the neighbors came to see it when I started to plow. They could not
believe it could perform so well on a hilly farm, where the wheeled
tractor we had had before had such a difficult time.
After we were finished with the plowing, a neighbor who was a
county official asked me to pull a county blade to do some road
grading. At that time the roads were only trails and most hills had a
ditch down the middle of the road. Cars were fairly new at this date
and most travel had been with horse and buggy. My father had been
appointed Road Boss in the early teens and I had some road grading
experience with horses and a small blade. It was not very much, but I
had observed how he had done it with the equipment he had.
In the fall of 1923, I started to do some grading work. To begin
with, I had only made a few rounds on a rather important one and a
half miles when it started to rain, which continued for two weeks in
early September. However, after the weather cleared, I finished that
one and a half miles of grading and continued through the fall until I
had completed thirty-five miles of new grading. I continued farming
with my father for ten years along with the grading work. After ten
years I sold the farming equipment and continued grading work. We
moved into Lyons in 1931. In 1933 ,I subcontracted with Peter Kiewitt
Sons Company, P. K. S. Co., on Highway 20 west of Jackson, Nebraska.
This grading was ahead of paving and was a very interesting job. This
was my first experience grading on a Nebraska state highway built to
the engineer's specifications.
The following year, I subcontracted from P. K. S. for grading on
Highway 81 north of York, Nebraska and also grading ahead of paving at
Ord, Nebraska. The summer of 1934 in Ord was one of the hottest
summers on record. Temperatures would range from 108 to 112 degrees.
We hired farmers' teams to pull our dump wagons. It was so hot, we
started work at 5:00 a.m. and ran until 10:00 a.m. Then we shut down
until 4:00 in the afternoon and worked until 7:00 p.m. The horses
could not stand the heat in the middle of the day. My family came out
to Ord after school was out and stayed until the middle of July when I
took them back to Lyons. We had a nice cool rain on that weekend.
When I returned to Ord the following morning, it was still 112
degrees. On a Saturday afternoon, I had completed the job, and was
ready to leave -- anxious to get home. I took the project engineer on
a final inspection of the job. He saw some stumps in a farmer's yard
who had asked me to put them there so he could cut them up for
firewood. The engineer decided I couldn't do that and told me to get
rid of those stumps. I had already sent my equipment home and didn't
have any idea of how I would move them. About this time, I ran into
Ed Anderson, a local man. He said, "Let's go down to the the Chevy
garage. They have a new truck wrecker". We walked in, and I asked
how much per hour to rent the wrecker. He said, "We don't rent by the
hour. Where's your truck and we'll give you a price". I explained my
problem, and he quoted me $4.50 per hour. It took us only an hour to
haul the stumps to the creek and dump them. I picked up the engineer
and said, "Let's take another look". He asked what I had done with
those stumps and I answered, "They aren't there, are they?" A very
mystified engineer had to approve my job and I happily left for home.
The following year, 1935, the Kiewitt Company got a grading and
culvert job at St. Francis, Kansas. I went to that job on January 15,
1935. This was one of the years that we had the terrible dust storms.
One day at 4:00 p.m., a large cloud came up from the northwest rolling
a great cloud of dust ahead of it. It turned completely dark. This
lasted about fifteen minutes. Finally, the northwest wind moved the
cloud on, and we began to be able to see again. The wind went down
during the night but left most of the houses cluttered with dust. As
I remember we had two more such storms that winter. I shared a room
with an interesting character on this job. His name was Court, and he
was a paving superintendent. He was always eager to tell somebody how
to do his job better. One morning about 6:00 a.m., he came out to the
job and noticed that I was not having my men loading their scrapers
from a borrow pit. I told him the ground was too wet, and that we
would have to use a dragline. He said we didn't bid the job to use a
dragline, and he'd show me how to get the job done. He gave out one
of his shrill whistles and motioned for an operator to pull into the
borrow pit. He whistled another one right in after him. About that
time the first guy was stuck and the second soon followed. Court
characteristically ran over to his car, jumped in and drove off
leaving me to undo his mess. It took me six hours to get those guys
out of the mud. Another time he came out and decided my operators
were not getting big enough loads in their scrapers. He whistled at
the first man in line and motioned to him to take a big cut. He
whistled at the next one and motioned him to do the same. Then he
turned to me and said, "See. That's how to load those scrapers". I
said that's fine, Court, but those men were finishing for me. Now I'm
going to have to have them haul some dirt back on. Court jumped in
his car and left. Another time Court came out to the job when it was
still dark. He had a new Chevy coupe., and promptly got stuck.
Instead of leaving his lights on, he just jumped out and left his
unlighted car in the roadway. Pretty soon, a Cat came along and the
operator felt his left track rolling up over something. That was one
time Court couldn't jump in his car and leave. The funniest occasion
of Court's interference was when he decided the bulldozer operator was
not pushing dirt fast enough over the edge of a dam we were building.
Court whistled him over and shouted, "I'll show you how to do this
job". Unbeknownst to Court, he was pulling up to the lip of the dam
slowly, because he knew the brakes were not working as they should.
Court roared up to the edge of the dam and tried to stop, but he was
going too fast and the brakes would not hold. He went over the top
and started down the other side. He pulled back on both steering
clutches, and the Cat zoomed down the long slope to the bottom. When
he finally got the machine stopped, he rushed over to his car and made
his getaway. We completed this job about May 15, 1935 which included
about one mile of grade across the Republican river valley. On
Memorial Day, it started to rain which turned into a cloudburst. The
flood that followed down the Republican river valley completely washed
away our new grade work. We were lucky we had completed the job, and
the highway department had accepted it.
From the St. Francis job I was transferred to Griswold, Iowa to
complete a job that P. K. S. had started the year before. This was
one of the first times that a LeTorneau scraper and a Caterpillar
tractor had been used on an Iowa highway job. It caused quite a lot
of interest in this type of equipment. We also had an elevator grader
and dump trucks to complete a long haul that was part of the work.
After the completion of this job for P. K. S., we started a joint
venture which we called K & M Construction Company, for Kiewitt and
McMullen. Our first job was a new location highway -- work on Highway
6 from Funk to Axtell, Nebraska. We worked this job twenty-four hours
a day in six-hour shifts, using small light plants for night work.
This was the first cat and scraper job that was done in Nebraska. It
also caused a lot of interest from the surrounding communities. A
number of people would drive out to the job site in the evening to
watch. We started the job in July during the hot time of year --
especially July of 1935 -- one of the hottest, dry summers of the
1930's.
There is one incident that I always recall when I think about
this job. One night during the Funk-Axtell work, one of our
superintendents called me at my rented Holdrege apartment at 2:00
a.m. to tell me they had hit a natural gas line while excavating dirt
out of a borrow pit for use on the highway. The land owner and the
engineer had informed me that the gas line was buried deep enough for
the planned excavation. I called the gas company. They got crews out
right away and had the line repaired before noon the next day.
Holdrege was not affected at all. The gas company had enough storage
to take care of the town's needs for that time of the year. We
finally completed this work in the first part of October.
On completion of the Funk-Axtell job we moved to Creighton,
Nebraska to build another new location road. We also worked this job
on a twenty-four hour per day plan. It was very hilly and slightly
sandy. It was located about nine miles west of Creighton. We started
the job in early October 1935. It was an interesting job. In one of
the cuts we hit some petrified trees. We left this cut, and a real
estate man came out from Creighton with some laborers and dug around
one of the petrified stumps. Sure enough, at the base of the stump,
roots were sprouting out in each direction. However, the real estate
man did not know that the stump should have been sprayed with a
protective material. It began to disintegrate soon after. One other
thing we found was a piece of large skeleton. It was a ball joint
about eight inches in diameter with a stump of bone about one foot
long. We found the bones at the toe of large fill slope when we were
finishing the job. So whenever we hit this skeleton in the cut, it
was wasted in the fill, probably when we were working during the
night. I gave the bones to the real estate man in town who gave them
to the University. When I handed him the big ball joint, he held it
up and, very seriously, said to me and Jim Murphy, the project
engineer, "Yes, this could be a bone from a prehistoric animal or, he
paused, it could be the skull of a prehistoric engineer". We all
laughed.
We had a very nice crew who, together with their families, moved
around with us to the various towns. We had only two cats and two
scrapers, so our crew was not very large. Most everyone liked to be
home for Thanksgiving -- but that fall we only took one day off. So
we invited our crew to a nice dinner in a very nice restaurant in
Creighton. They were so pleased that in December, they had the garage
man talk me into leaving my new Plymouth in the main garage because he
said he had some friends coming to town who wanted to use the local
garage where I ordinarily kept my car. The next morning when I came
to the main garage to get my car, I found that our crew had had a new
radio installed in it. We worked on this job until December 21, 1935
when it began to get cold, freezing the ground.
After the Creighton job, we moved to a job located about ten
miles east of Gordon, Nebraska. Our project extended about nine miles
to the northeast on Highway 20. This was a different type of job. It
was all pure sandhill country. After we started, the road was closed
because of the pure fine sand on which cars could not travel. The
Department of Roads of the state of Nebraska had to build and maintain
a detour alongside the road through the prairie. They did this by
placing hay on the trailway so cars could travel over the sand. Even
then, inexperienced drivers would have trouble and get stuck by going
too slow and then putting their cars in low gear and spinning the
wheels. It so happened that 1936 was an election year and one group
of politicians came out that way with a new car and a house trailer
with a loud speaker attached. They got stuck and spun their car
wheels until they were down on the hay-covered road. Finally a spark
from the exhaust ignited the hay, burning the car and the trailer.
There were a lot of sandhill rattlesnakes in this area. We
killed and kept count of them until we had passed fifty snakes, after
which we did not keep count any more. Again on this job we worked
twenty-four hours a day, changing shifts every six hours. We had an
interesting experience in finding a place to live in Gordon. We found
an apartment on the second floor of a fairly new building. We lived
there for a couple of weeks when I called one of my former high school
teachers who had moved to Gordon. Her name was Vera Griswold,
daughter of the late governor Griswold. She was so surprised to hear
that we were living in Gordon. She told me that she and her mother
were going on a summer trip to Norway and Sweden, and she wanted us to
live in their house for the summer. We did move into their home for
the summer and enjoyed it very much. We also enjoyed her cat, named
Sunshine. The grading job progressed very smoothly, and we had no
problems. During the summer, several of our relatives from Decatur
came out to visit us in Gordon, and we spent many Sundays up in the
Black Hills which was always a joyful trip. I always thought there
was more continuous beauty in the Black Hills than in the Rocky
Mountains. It was our first drilling and blasting experience on a
highway job. However, I had had blasting experiences several years
before on county work clearing trees.
This job was more or less routine except for the one hill with
limestone. Again we worked twenty-four hours per day. While we were
working the Marsland job, one of our operators, Alvin Anderson, found
a kangaroo rat (commonly called a pack rat) out in the pasture. He
kept it in his car. Whenever he would put something in his car, the
pack rat would take it. But, he would always put something back to
replace whatever he took. Finally Alvin left his car door open and
his pet escaped, and he never saw it again. He was sorry to lose it.
The kangaroo rat was built like a real kangaroo -- the hind legs were
long and the front were rather short. We had an apartment in
Hemingford, Nebraska. We completed that job in late October of 1936.
From there we moved to Lamar, Colorado. This work was from Lamar
east on Highway 50. This job consisted of grading, culverts, bridges
and crushed rock surfacing. It was a very nice winter in Lamar. We
were able to complete all the work during the winter. When we arrived
in Lamar, we had to stay in the hotel for a couple of weeks until we
found Jean Pardee who was a champion calf roper, following the rodeo.
He and his family were leaving Lamar to go on a rodeo tour so he
rented his apartment to us. It was very comfortable. I remember
another unusual incident in Lamar. We had a young man working for us.
He was a very good worker but he was not signing his time cards. I
called him in and told him you must sign your time cards. He finally
told me he could not write. His father had died when he was quite
young, and he never went to school. I told him that this was one job
where he was going to learn to sign his name. It wasn't easy, but he
did learn how to sign his name.
In the spring of 1937 we were successful bidder on a job from
west of Kit Carson northwest toward Hugo, Colorado. This job also
consisted of grading, culverts, bridges, crushed rock surfacing and
four-barbed barbwire fence. It was mostly new location through a
grass prairie. In fact, there were ten bridges to build. We started
the job in March of 1937 and completed it in October. One of the
first things we had to do was build the barbwire fence to keep the
range cattle out of the roadway. One spring night, after we had part
of the fence completed, a bluster storm came up with a lot of wind and
blowing thistles. This flushed a herd of antelope which were running
wild in the region. One of them ran into the fence and was killed.
We notified the game warden the next day, so that he would know the
exact circumstances of the animal's death. Another interesting thing
that I remember is that we had to excavate for the abutments of the
bridge. I found it was much too slow to excavate two bridge abutments
overnight, as we were still working twenty-four hours per day. We
placed the excavated material in the road embankment, leaving the
bridge area clean of excavated material that would have been there if
excavated with a dragline. When the bridge was completed, we would
get this material from the roadway borrow pits. This system worked
very well and was much cheaper than excavating with the dragline.
Another project I planned was the method of building the fence.
We found the soil very hard after driving a steel post down into the
ground with a hand post driver. So we arranged for one man to go
ahead and line up the posts and drive them about six inches into the
ground. Then we rigged up a flatbed truck with an air compressor and
a platform on the side of the truck., two jack hammers fitted with a
steel post driver and two men. They would complete driving two posts
in twenty to thirty seconds. The truck would then move up to the next
two posts. They were driven at sixteen and a half foot spacing. This
system really speeded up our fence building.
Over the fourth of July holiday in 1937 we took a trip to Estes
Park. Several of our key men and their families went along. Cabins
were readily available for rent, and we had a glorious fourth with one
exception. Our nephew, Phil Connealy, was working for us and came
along to the park. He and some of the younger folks went downtown to
buy some fireworks. Phil bought a skyrocket. Not knowing anything
about how to handle a skyrocket, he held it in one hand and lit it
with the other. He received a very bad burn on one hand, but luckily
there was a doctor in Estes who dressed it for him without any bad
results. However, he had a very sore hand for a while.
Another incident I recall was our steel trying foreman who was
always bragging about his shooting skill with a rifle. The other men
laughed at him until one day a jack rabbit jumped out of the bushes,
and he, Colin Finney, shot it with a 22 rifle. He also told the men
he could take a 22 rifle and shoot a hole through a gallon pail of
water so the water would run out of both sides which he demonstrated.
But he said he couldn't do this with the deer rifle. This he also
demonstrated, and the gallon pail of water simply exploded -- much too
high velocity on that bullet.
We did have a well-organized working outfit. For the grading
spread we had a superintendent with two foremen. We also had a
structure superintendent, a carpenter foreman, a resteel tying foreman
and a concrete pouring foreman. We poured concrete every day. The
carpenter foreman and his crew would set forms every day. Resteel set
every day followed by concrete in the forms.
When we started setting steel, we had a structural foreman along
with a rivetting crew. This crew consisted of a rivet hector, a rivet
catcher and placer, a buckup man (he held a buckup bar on the head of
a rivet) and finally the man with the air-driven rivet hammer. Our
crew was so good that we had very few cutouts, that is, rivets that
were not solid. Although our job was in a rather dry area, we had a
number of floods through the bridge sites. One two-hundred foot
bridge we built had some big floods down the channel, although we did
not have a drop of rain on the site.
Also this was the first time I ever saw a wall of water come down
the valley in an ordinarily dry stream. This was in the Big Sandy
which ran by the south edge of Hugo. We had been offered a house to
live in near the north bank of the Big Sandy, but we were always
afraid of floods. We did find a nice home about a block north of Main
Street in Hugo. In all our travels moving from job to job, our
children were well-accepted and had fun in the neighborhoods except
and unless it was the time in Hugo. That was when Kathy found a dead
garter snake and chased the kids around with it. Peggy has hated
snakes every since. We completed this job in October except for some
minor clean-up work.
Our next job was from Highway 6 northeast of Sterling north to
the Nebraska state line near Peetz, Colorado., We moved there in
October, 1937, It consisted again of bridges, culverts, grading and
crushed rock surfacing. We were very fortunate in finding a nice
place to live in Sterling. I cannot remember their names, but the man
was a travelling man, so he was always gone during the week. He and
his wife moved into their basement, and we had the ground floor.
There was no second floor.
We had the same crew as we had in Hugo, and everything started
working very well. This was our first experience with brule clay in a
hill we had to cut. The scrapers would not cut into it, and it was
impossible to pull a ripper through it. The tracks of the tractors
would simply spin. We had to blast it. At first, we tried drilling
holes too widely-spaced, and it could only pop out a small hole. So
we figured out much closer spacing and drilled to the depth of the
cut. Next we loaded all the holes with dynamite and shot the entire
area with electric caps. This worked very well, shattering the brule
clay into workable pieces. We would then load the material with a
shovel machine into trucks and haul it into one half-side of the fill.
We then had to wait a few days and the chunks would air slack and
break up just the same as regular clay. It was a good thing there was
only one such hill on the entire job. We worked at the grading by
passing the bridge and culvert sites until they were completed. I
remember on bridges that we had completed or were under construction,
our bridge superintendent complained about the steel not fitting in
the abutments. We corrected this by adding to the abutment steel.
When the bridge was completed, we had the grading crew backfill the
bridge and asked the grading engineering crew to set blue-tops, i.e.,
proper grade stakes, up to the bridge. He found the bridge was one
foot too high compared to his grading elevations. That was the reason
the steel didn't fit. This was the fall of 1937,
Then we had about 98,000 tons of crushed rock to put on the road.
We had a tentative sub-contractor for the crushed rock but the
P. K. S. Company bought a large crusher that was scheduled to go to
Montana. So they sent it to our job. We started on January 5, 1938.
We had the crusher set up with a bin arrangement so the material ran
into the bin which set above a scale. A truck would drive onto the
scale under the bin, a man would open the gate and when the required
tonnage filled, the truck driver would drive away with his load and
another truck would drive in. We worked the crushing outfit
twenty-four hours a day except on Sunday. We completed the crushed
rock job on February 3, 1938. Our job was charged one month's rental
for the crusher, but I am sure the company expected the work to
require two months. We completed the entire project in the spring of
1938.
After that job, we moved to Longmont, Colorado. We were able to
rent a nice place there. Our job was six miles east of Longmont, but
running north to south about ten miles long. We bid this job as a
joint venture with Condon-Cunningham of Omaha. They did the bridges,
and we did the grading and small concrete irrigation structures. The
right of way was widened so we had to move all of the farmers'
laterals and concrete weirs, drop boxes, etc. back into their fields.
It was an interesting job consisting of borrow pits and some hill
excavation.
In one borrow pit that was located close to a coal mine facility,
I went to the superintendent of the mine to see if they had anything
in the borrow pit such as water pipes. He and his staff gave me a
very definite "NO". However, there was a six-inch water pipe that
came up out of the mine which they had to use periodically to pump
water out of a pit that they had damned up down in the mine, and we
hit it. We had quite a struggle making the repairs. It finally
resulted in having our mechanic, Chet Fox, go down into the mine to
complete the job. But, he would not go down into the mine unless I
went along -- which I did. To say the least, neither of us cared much
about being down 125 feet in a mine.
One interesting part of the job was that we had to cut a new
channel on the St. Vrain river. It was all gravel, and we were able
to dig it with scrapers. The gravel material was used in the
embankments. Later in the season, it began to rain bringing numerous
floods. The St. Vrain river overflowed its banks, washing out all of
the gravel embankment. After the state viewed the situation, they
bought a borrow pit on a hill a couple of miles south of the
washed-out embankment. We hauled this material with trucks to rebuild
the road where it had washed out. We loaded the trucks with an
elevator grader.
Another incident on this job was that we had a number of large
cottonwood trees to remove. The district engineer told me when I was
ready to remove them to let him know because the electric power
company would shut the electricity off of the line. The day arrived
to remove the trees. I told the engineer, and we used cat tractors
and cables to pull the trees over. We were nearly finished -- only
two trees were left. When we pulled the next to last tree over, the
last tree also fell as we disturbed its roots. It was uncontrolled
because it did not have a cable on it, and it fell across the
telephone line. Then a piece of this line fell across the electric
line. Lo and behold, the fire flew in every direction, but no-one was
hurt. The power company had failed to turn the electricity off. This
short burned out an $800. dollar transformer for which the electric
company billed our company. I promptly contacted the district
engineer who took the bill with him to the power company. It was the
electric company's fault, and we didn't have to pay.
One nice thing of the summer of 1938 was living in Longmont which
was located at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Every Sunday
afternoon, we would drive up into the mountains and have Sunday dinner
at various restaurants in the mountains. Also there was Estes Park to
go to which was and still is a nice place to visit in the summer.
Our next and last job in the joint venture with the
P. K. S. Company was about seventy miles east of Denver on Highway 36.
We looked at a place to stay in Fort Morgan and finally did move there
for a short time. There were no towns on this highway job and Fort
Morgan was forty miles away. We later moved to 1539 Cherry Street in
Denver.
The job again consisted of grading, bridges, culverts and crushed
rock surfacing. There were three large bridges to build -- one 350
foot steel I beam and two rigid arch bridges. We build the I beam
bridge, but the Mulstien Construction Company wanted to set the rigid
arch bridges, and he had a grading job north of Akron, Colorado that
he wanted to trade to us. He was a builder and did not have any
grading equipment, and he had bid the job north of Akron anyway and
was successful bidder. We started this job in the fall of 1938
working at the grading structures during the fall and winter.
However, it turned very cold after Christmas, and we had to stop
grading. We continued on the I beam structure. It consisted of two
abutments and two piers dug approximately forty feet deep to hard,
black shale. Then we had to dig a hole into the shale to the neat
lines of the footing. Concrete was poured over re-steel directly into
the footing. When the concrete set up, we built the abuttment or pier
in fourteen feet lifts. We had the two-pier west abuttment completed
and had poured the east abuttment footing and had the first fourteen
foot lift read to pour on January 8 which was a Saturday. The
engineers had asked me to wait to pour on Monday because it was
Saturday. Of course, great old me said, "Okay:". Saturday night it
started raining all night, all day Sunday and Sunday evening. Then a
wall of water came down the valley ruining our fourteen foot form set.
We had to remove the forms and clean out all the mud and trash. This
was very costly. However, we cleaned up the mess and completed the
abuttment. In the spring we finished the bridge, setting the steel I
beams and pouring the concrete deck. Also we completed the grading,
culverts and crushed rock surfacing. The job was finally completed in
June, 1939. This was the last job we did as K & M Construction
Company. P. K. S. Company was beginning to do construction work
building army camps, airports, etc. for the beginning of World War II.
We dissolved the K & M Company.
When I was driving back and forth from the job into Denver, I had
noticed a large dam south of Highway 36 with a large place washed out.
This was on the Noonan Ranch. The dam had been partially washed out
in 1935 during the cloud burst that had gone down the Republican river
and had washed out the road at St. Francis, Kansas. I drove down a
trail to the base and saw that a three-hundred foot gap in the dam had
been washed out. I drove back to the highway and found a drive out to
the north leading to the Noonan Ranch house. There I met Mike Noonan
who was the son of Old Man Noonan who had built the dam in 1909. The
Noonan Ranch was a sheep ranch normally raising five thousand lambs
per year. After several visits with Mike, we finally arranged an
agreement in which I would repair the dam. This was during January
and February of 1940. There was quite a large pond in the gap of the
dam which Mike had stocked with fish. We pumped the water out, and,
as we got down towards the bottom, Mike and his crew were getting fish
out and taking them to other farm dams. Our employees got quite a few
bullheads out and took them to the camp where we put them in a horse
tank with clean water. After a couple of days of changing water
several times, the bullheads cleaned themselves out completely after
which we dressed them and grilled them. They were very good eating.
Then as we began to fill in the area of the gap, we started on
the south side of the hole, pushing good dirt in and squeezing the mud
out and downstream. Our borrow pit was out in the dam area. We would
strip about one and a half feet of silt off and beneath was very good
fill dirt. We did this work during cold weather. When it would get
too cold, we might have to stop a couple of days until it would warm
up enough for us to continue. Because of the size of the dam, it was
necessary for Mike to have a state irrigation inspector on the job.
He was Mike Henderlighter from Denver. His dad was the state
irrigation engineer. When we were nearly finished with the dam,
Mike's lady friend, owner of a single-engine airplane, invited him to
fly to New Orleans for the Mardi Gras. They and another couple took
off one morning for New Orleans. I had told Mike, "When you get near
New Orleans, you might run into foggy weather. I would not let the
pilot fly in fog since he is not an instrument pilot". They did run
into fog, got lost, and were all killed when they tried to land.
During the winter of 1940, I had bid a highway job up north of
Carrol, Nebraska. We moved to Carrol in March of 1940. We only did
the grading work there and completed the job in July. We had a nice
place to live in the upstairs apartment of Perry and Ann Johnson. In
August we were successful bidder on a job at Bostwick, Nebraska, north
of Superior. However, Yant Construction had a small grading job that
we did at Brainard, Nebraska before we moved the equipment to
Bostwick. We then decided to move to Lincoln, Nebraska because it
would be more of a central place to live for working around the state.
We moved to Lincoln on September 1, 1940. We rented a house at 2911
Randolph Street from Pauley Lumber Company. This was a very nice
two-story house, and we were very comfortable there.
The Bostwick job went along quite smoothly. We had wonderful
weather all during October, not even freezing at night. This
continued into November until the 10th when it started raining on
Saturday, changing to snow and turning much colder. It dropped to
below zero on Armistice Day, the 11th of November. There was a
terrible loss of turkeys that hadn't been sent to market yet for
Thanksgiving. Also a number of hunters were caught in their duck
blinds. Some died from exposure in the terribly cold and snowy
weather. This cold weather ended our work on the highway job for
1940.
Later that spring, we moved our equipment to a highway job east
of Seward under contract to Theisen Brothers of Osmond, Nebraska. We
rented our equipment to them and worked for them as supervisors. They
were working two ten-hour shifts, and we completed the job in August.
Theisen then moved two of the cats and scrapers and our equipment to
Allen, Nebraska to build a new location road from Allen north to
Highway 20. We started this job on September 6, 1941. We had three
cats and scrapers, and I was the only supervisor. We started working
two ten-hour shifts, but as it got later in the fall and with quite a
lot of rain during the fall we changed to eight hours off and eight
hours on -- working twenty-four hours a day. Because it was getting
later in the fall, it was important that we should complete the job
before winter. The eight hours off and eight hours on did not work so
well because the operators would not go to bed after their eight-hour
shifts and would come out late on their next shift. As a result, we
changed our schedule to twelve hours on and twelve hours off. Believe
me, there was no more trouble about the operators not going to bed
after twelve hours of operating a cat and scraper. Finally, although
we had some bad stretches of weather, we completed the job the last of
November, 1941. The weather stayed nice on through December, and we
moved to another job for the Theisen Brothers north of Central City,
Nebraska where we worked the rest of 1941,
It was on December 7, 1941 that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the
spring of 1942 was occupied with work to build up army camps and
airports. In the early spring of 1942, Theisen Brothers had work
building the Mead Ordinance Plant site, grading for buildings and
roads. We worked there until the middle of May and then moved to
Lincoln where we started to grade for warehouses and barracks at the
Lincoln Air Base. This was all daytime work. But later in the
spring, plans were ready to develop new runways for airplanes. This
developed into an enormous job. The entire area was land with farm
houses on county roads. All buildings had to be removed and a process
of landscaping took place. Theisen Brothers rented a lot more
equipment as we began the landscaping. Because of the urgency to get
runways built, we began working night and day. I ran two eight-hour
shifts from 4:00 a.m. until noon and from noon until 8:00 p.m. This
went on seven days a week including all holidays.
All the heavy rough grading was done during the night to
eliminate undercutting the grade on the hills. Then, during the
daytime, I and another foreman would split up the crew and let the
less skilled operators continue the heavy grading on the runways.
This took lots of checking of grade elevations and setting stakes for
the operators to cut and/or fill to the proper grade for the paving
crews.
After the runways were complete, we began to work on the parking
apron. This was an area four-hundred feet wide and I cannot remember
how long. We quit the night grading after the runways were completed.
I remember, after the parking apron was completed, some mornings we
would come out to work and the entire apron work would be occupied by
B17's. The Air Corps flew them in overnight. Another morning when we
came to work, they would all be gone. In that short time the flyers
had completed their training and had received their first order to fly
to Europe for combat.
It was January of 1942 that our son, Dick enlisted in the Air
Corps. However, they did not call him right away. The draft came
along the next month. Dick and I registered for the draft on the 16th
of February, 1942. I was never called up because of my age. Dick, of
course, was called into the Air Corps. He took his primary training
at Coleman, Texas. His basic training occurred at San Angelo, Texas.
For the final phase he was sent to Lubbock, Texas where he finally got
his wings.
After completing the work at the air base late in December,
Theisen got a job building the bases for the triple igloo storage
facilities at the Hastings Naval Supply Depot. As a recall, there
were one-hundred-forty-two of them to construct. As the prime
contractor completed the concrete igloos on the pads that we had
built, we came behind and covered them with dirt.
Chapter 2: Early Memories
Chapter 3: Farming Pioneer -- Born Thirty Years Too Soon
Chapter 4: School Days
Chapter 5: Courtship
Chapter 6: On The Road
Chapter 7: Colorado Years
Chapter 8: Back to Nebraska