Of Sweat and Soil Part 3

Of Sweat and Soil

Part 3

By John W. Vander Velden

 

I do not know what thoughts passed through my parent’s mind when they got off the train in LaPorte, Indiana that October day in 1948.  My Aunt Agatha and Uncle Cornelius Koppert met them as they arrived.  Also, by chance, Rev. Victor Fronie, the pastor of St. Paul’s Evangelical and Reformed Church, happened to be at the station that evening.  He would be our family’s pastor all the years we lived in the LaPorte area.

Frank Scholl needed someone with a strong back and a willingness to work.  He found both in my father.  I know little of those years he worked for the Scholls.  They lived in a small house next to Scholl Hill on Division Road.  Dad was provided with an old Willy’s Jeep to drive the four miles down Scholl Road (see the pattern here) to the Oak Ridge Farm, where he worked with my Uncle.  Perhaps being surrounded by everything new and different, they might not have notice how difficult those first few years were.  But they learned the language.  For though they had taken English lessons in Holland, it seemed, as dad said, “A different English” than what was spoken in America.

They felt, in many ways, isolated.  Separated from most of their family, and living within a culture they did not fully understand must have left them reeling, if they had time to notice.  But it was a start, and hope lay on their horizon. Their first born, Gerard, named after Dad’s father, came in those Scholl years, as life progressed.  In late 1951 or very early 1952 dad’s first break came in the man named William Coughenour. Dad had been no more than a hired man at Scholl’s, but began farming on his own as a tenant for Mr. Coughenour on his farm near Westville.

Three more children came the years they lived on the Westville farm.  I was born first, soon after they had moved there, followed by Joyce in 1955 and Dorothy in 1956.  As a child growing up, the country life was the only thing I knew.  Access to the fields and woods and time spent watching the minnows or tadpoles in the ditch a part of my memories of those years.  We sledded down the hill across the road from our house in the winter, and I taught myself to ride a bicycle.  And I remember my parents hard at work, mom at home and dad not so far away, usually within sight.  I remember a cold hard winter, 1957 or 1958.  The Coughenours wintering in Florida trusted my father to run things.  The snows stacked, the roads closed, even a tractor couldn’t cover the half mile between our house and the dairy barn on Joliet Road.  Dad cut squares of plywood and tied them to his boots, snow shoes he called them, to walk over the deep drifts to tend to his work and the cattle’s needs.  The National Guard came with a helicopter to bring food to the families trapped by the snow and cold.  It was the only time my father rode in such a machine.  They picked him up when he had reached the other farm, brought him and two boxes of groceries, landing across the road from our home.  Of course when they left, my father had to trudge across the half mile of fields once again to the dairy barn.

I do not know what my parents thought of those years, but it was a beginning, a real beginning.  They slowly built up the things that made up a farm.  Dad’s first farm equipment his first cattle these came during those years.  They were progressing…moving forward but their dream was no more than some faint glimpse beyond even their farthest vision.

But things changed, life does that you know.

Dad had the greatest respect for Mr. Coughenour and learned so much about farming from the gentleman.  The feelings were mutual, for when Mr. Coughenour retired to a ranch in North Central Florida, he convinced my father to go along.

I was in second grade when we loaded all we had on a 49 Dodge truck in the late fall of 1959 and moved to Alachua, Florida and a very different life.

(707 Words)