Of Sweat and Soil: Part 4 The Florida Years

Of Sweat and Soil

Part 4:  The Florida Years

Florida was a great place for kids…then.  I suspect in many ways it still is.  But this isn’t about the childhood I had, it’s about the road my parents took.

It was almost exactly eleven years since my parents had come to the United States that they migrated again.  Yes, it was the same country…but…  The weather alone would have been enough for Florida to claim a foreign status to the Northern Europeans.  And the people there spoke English, but once again it was not exactly the same.  Phrases and slangs were unique to the South.  But overall we fit into the culture…for the most part.  Though there were parts of the “Culture of that age” which I still abhor to this day…parts my family never participated.

Again for dad things were very different.  The “Ranch”, the 500 acres of mostly swampland and pine trees, was not the dairy farm we had left.  We had two cows, which dad milked by hand in stalls that stood outdoors.  We began with Brahma and Brahma mix cattle.  I recall one that had long horns that stood straight out like a Texas Longhorn.  I remember one cow that injured her back jumping out of the cattle truck, the wound never completely healing.  Most of the cattle were mean enough we gave them wide berth.  For a time the ranch had an old ford pickup.  We would ride in the back while dad poured feed off the tailgate as it drove through the pine grove.  The animals running up behind to be first to gobble up the treats.

The weather in central Florida had little in common with Indiana.  Strange though winter “lows” might dip only into the twenties, yet coats were as heavy.  I suppose the difference from summer’s intense heat to winter’s frost drove the need.  But I remember the crazy intense summer afternoon thunderstorms that swept through around two o’clock. It was in Florida my older brother became a hunter and the September Hurricane Donna tore through the state, my youngest brother James was born.

Hoping for a little extra cash for his growing family, dad built two large hotbeds in the lot next to the house.  I remember a small red International cub tractor and the transplanter that he and my brother Jerry rode as they placed the thousands of green pepper plants between the machine’s moving fingers.  I was to run behind and fill in the ones that got missed.  I couldn’t keep up very long.  Peppers must not have done well for the following year the hothouses were replaced by a field of watermelons.  All the work resulted in a truck load of the green fruit.  Dad parked on a busy intersection but sold few.  Most of that truckload of melons came home and were, over time, fed to the pigs.  With those fed, those given away, and those our family devoured, none went to waste.  I never had a taste for watermelons, maybe that’s why.

Dad was the first in Alachua County to grow corn for grain.  At least as far as I know he was first.  A few others raised corn for silage, but he was told Florida was no place for field corn.  He bought a two row planter and planted in February…imagine that.  It was difficult to find a corn picker, but a one row Minneapolis Moline snapper was found at last.  You picked corn in the summer…August maybe.  The corn so dry…hard to imagine with the humidity of the place…that what we knew as corncribs were not necessary.  He shoveled the corn from the wagon to bins made in a pole barn.  I remember walking past that stored corn and hearing the crackely-crackle of the weevil feeding on the bright orange ears.

Dad ground feed after dark, because it was all hand labor and the days were too hot.  Things did not go well for him in Florida, a place too hot for a working man to work the way he wanted.  Maybe if he had stayed things might have turned around, but in two and a half years all the gains he had made since 1948 had dwindled away.

On February 20^th 1962 with the old 49 Dodge truck loaded to the hearth, we left Florida, the friends and connections, and even the Coughnours behind.  For dad, it meant starting over in Indiana. 

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