Wheat: A Memoir

By Del Newkirk

WHEAT is a true story of the memories of a boy who grew up on a small Indiana farm just as World War II began. Dawn to dark labor year round instilled in him, the middle of three sons of a hard driving conservative Lutheran, a work ethic he applied the remainder of his life.

He continues to work hard, but now it means raising millions of dollars for community projects in Brown County, Indiana. Newkirk founded the Brown County Community Foundation in 1992, served as its volunteer CEO for five years, and through it helped bring into being the Brown County Community YMCA, the award winning Brown County Public Library and the Brown County Career Resource Center. Newkirk also was the founder of the Rotary Club of Brown County.

WHEAT will be an inspiration to those who think new opportunities are illusions and fulfillment in everyday life not theirs to achieve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491818732

Del Newkirk

WHEAT is a memoir that affords an insight into one person’s life. A life full of many failures and a few successes. A life journey built on a foundation of faith, love, and work. Del Newkirk’s first career was as an owner of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Wendy’s Restaurants. Newkirk’s second career was that of a volunteer raising millions of dollars for community projects. He is active in numerous Indiana University organizations and was the recipient of the Sagamore of the Wabash Award from Governor Frank O’Bannon in 2003. Today he manages the one hundred twenty five year old family farm and lives in Indiana and Colorado. This is his first book.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

This is a story about a boy who was born on an Indiana farm in 1939. He was a son of loving parents who, while very strict and poor in most material ways, would sacrifice so very much for this boy and love him unconditionally. It’s a story also about a man who loves his family unconditionally. It’s a unique story. It’s my story.

I was born a country boy, a farm kid, and being so was shaped and defined as a person by my experiences on the farm. When I became a little older, I experienced the conflict of two distinct worlds: town and country. This conflict probably had a lot to do with me not being a very good son during most of my teen years. But the values that my folks imparted to me and the sacrifices they made for me were beyond measure. I loved them more than I knew and, therefore, more than they knew. I wish that I could tell them that. Why do we wait so long to tell our loved ones how much we love them?

In this day of electronic communication, letter writing is a lost art. I have written this book in hopes that it will be a permanent letter to my family. Maybe there will be some entertainment value. Maybe sharing some of the philosophy and values that have guided my life will prove to be of value to the reader.

A writing teacher once said, Start a story with the truth but depart from it quickly. What follows, however, is truth, at least to the extent of my recollection. There will be some things that the reader will be certain are not true, but they probably are. What may not be true are some things that I just am not sure about, but even these are close. I know that my vision of the past is not unimpaired. In some ways, it might have been better to have made this a novel instead of an autobiography. I could have developed the Del character and not have been too concerned about struggling to tell the truth. The project also would probably have taken less time. Instead of researching for dates and facts, I could have made things up to make them fit.

Little did I know when I started out on the journey to write this memoir in 2006 how long it would take. By definition, a memoir is a self-centered work. It’s mainly about I. For that reason, since I’m not good at being self-centered, I pretty much lost my enthusiasm for the project. However, having said that, maybe there will be some things of interest to the reader. After that kind of praise, I’m sure that your interest is stimulated. Interest or lack of interest might be further stimulated to know that my editors first wanted to charge $15,000—or about $50 per page—to work on this manuscript. Their intent was to rewrite the book. My exercise in vanity did not extend to having my book rewritten.

Thanks for giving me an opportunity to tell my story, my way.

CHAPTER ONE

In the Beginning

I was born on March 8, 1939, and baptized at St. Paul Lutheran Church at Clifty on March 26, 1939. However, my history began on September 1, 1935, as this was the day that Woodrow Harvey Newkirk married a beautiful nineteen-year-old woman by the name of Thelma Irene Nolting. Woody was twenty-three. Thelma and Woody had dated for four years.

September 1, 1935, was also the date that Dad began farming on my home place. The newlyweds moved into a house that was probably built around 1900. The house had electricity but did not have inside plumbing. Thus they started their life together.

When Mother and Dad married, Mother’s parents, Henry and Ella Nolting, and Mother’s younger sister, Lois, moved to Columbus to a home at Fourteenth and Chestnut Streets. Grandpa Nolting also purchased a house next door, into which son Eldo and his wife, also named Thelma, moved into. Next door to these two houses, along the railroad track, they purchased a building and opened a dairy there called the Cloverdale Dairy. So Woody and Thelma started their life together. Mother was to never leave her home place, and Dad would be there for sixty-seven years. Dad and Mother paid some rent to the Noltings and later to Mother’s siblings Eldo Nolting and Lois Nolting Anderson. In 1961, they purchased the farm from the Nolting estate.

The seventy acre farm as comprised of two parcels that came into the family at different times-a forty acre piece and a thirty acre piece. The land was originally land granted in 1834 by the United States when Andrew Jackson was president. The forty acres came into the family in 1877 when my great-grandfather Henry Christopher Nolting purchased it for $150 per acre. The thirty acres was acquired by my grandfather Henry J. Nolting in 1923. At that time he became the twenty-eighth owner of this land since it was land granted. We are now the thirtieth owners. We presently value the land at $6,000 per acre. The abstract of the two parcels can provide the detailed ownership chain.

Originally all of this land was unproductive, swampy, land. After many years of back breaking work of laying, by hand, clay tile it has become some of the most productive land in Bartholomew County

This would be a good place to mention that Henry C. Nolting bought this farm after serving in the Civil War from 1860–1864. He and his brother Charles enlisted with Company G–33rd Indiana Infantry. Some of the battles he fought in were: Wild Cat, Kentucky; Crab Orchard, Kentucky; Lexington; Cumberland Gap; Thompson Station; Resaca; New Hope Church; Kennesaw Mountain; Peach Tree Creek; Atlanta; Averasboro; and Bentonville. He was critically wounded at the battle of Thompson Station and at one time was a prisoner in Libbee Prison. There is a copy of his heart wrenching letter that he wrote home while in prison in the Nolting/Tiemeyer genealogy file in our home library. Henry C. is buried at St. Paul Clifty Cemetery. His marker is easy to find as it is the tallest one in the cemetery.

Today the farm is owned by Newkirk Partners LLP. I own two- thirds of Newkirk Partners and David owns one-third. I bought Dewayne’s one-third share in 2011. The farm’s future ownership will depend on Liesl and Christopher and Jeremy, Nicholas, and Will.

There is an old saying that you can take the boy out of the country, but you cannot take the country out of the boy. this is especially true in my case. Today whenever I walk this land, I connect with my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather. I think about how hard they worked on this land, clearing rocks; laying clay tile with only a tile spade for a tool; farming using a hand scythe to cut wheat; and using mules, horses, and the first tractor—John Deere Model H.

Another farm that I owned was a citrus ranch in Madera County in the San Joaquin Valley. I owned this ranch from 1986–2000. My friends John and Kris Rose, who lived in Fresno, also owned a citrus ranch and I stayed with them whenever I came to work on my ranch. I loved spending time on the ranch doing chores: caring for the trees, removing the thorny suckers from the navel orange trees, burning brush, working on the irrigation. I worked either by myself or sometimes with the Mexican workers. There was also the problem with the pomegranate trees. Years earlier, someone had the idea to interplant pomegranate trees between the navel orange trees. These pomegranate trees were an extreme nuisance as they interfered with the citrus farming practices, and the fruit had little value. The trees were also very hard to get rid of since they kept coming back, maybe that’s why eating pomegranates is associated with long life. We finally got rid of the pomegranate trees. It’s ironic that today the pomegranate fruit is quite valuable. I sold the land in 2000 because of the press of more and more houses that were being built on all sides of the property. Citrus farming cultural practices weren’t compatible with residential. One time, for example, when we aerial sprayed the trees, some of the spray drifted into a nearby homeowner’s pond and killed all his fish. Since the ranch had been subdivided years earlier, it was more valuable for residential use than as a citrus ranch.

The ninety-seven-acre property that Letty and I bought in Brown County, Indiana, was also a farm in many respects. Timber stand improvement and soil and water conservation were important issues. I also worked in the woods making trails, then keeping them open and putting up bluebird and wood duck houses. One of the reasons that we sold the property in 2006 was that it required too much work. This is spurious reasoning since none of this work had to be done. I miss walking in the woods, sliding down the steep hills on my butt, or just sitting quietly under a tree, maybe watching a doe and her fawn or seeing a pileated woodpecker noisily attacking a small tree and throwing bark in all directions. The love of the land plus leaving the two houses that we had put so much of ourselves into makes me homesick for this property. This is especially true when I see how the current owner has allowed the houses and land to deteriorate. I felt more at home on this land than anywhere that I have ever lived, and I wish that we still owned this property. I’ve never felt as relaxed in the city. For one thing, in town we can’t run naked out to the hot tub. Today Naumkeag, an Eastern American Indian word meaning haven of peace, is in a sad state. The man who bought the property from us has trashed it. He has rusty cars and boats on the property, he has jammed the house and carriage house and other buildings with stuff, and he has fenced in part of the pristine valley for a corral for a couple of steers. I tear up whenever I have seen this.

The House–My Home Place

The house originally stood on a hill to the north of the present house. It was moved to its present location possibly in 1877. It looked a lot different then. Shortly after being moved the house was enlarged and the exterior was covered with colored glass that was set into wet mortar. Definitely a most unusual looking exterior.

These are the rooms in the house: porch, attic, pantry, kitchen, bathroom, dining room, middle bedroom, the little bedroom, front room, front bedroom, sun parlor, cellar and presses.

Except for the addition of a bathroom, the house has changed very little over the years. The front door opened into the sun parlor, but this door was seldom used to enter the house. The back door that opened onto the porch then into the kitchen served as the main entry to the house. The pantry was just to the left as you entered the kitchen. The door to the cellar was just to the right of the kitchen door. The floor plan was that adjoining the dining room was the middle bedroom. This was Mother and Dad’s bedroom, so you had to walk through their bedroom to get to the living room, the front bedroom, and the sun parlor. The front bedroom was occupied, but the living room and sun parlor were seldom used. The sun parlor, which was on the west end of this long house, was a very cheery place that was located by the front door. It was a nice place to spend time in to read or whatever, but I guess no one had any time to do things like that. The living room would end up being closed up as much as possible to conserve heat. It did have a player piano in it that we occasionally enjoyed. This was also the piano that Dad used to play and practice his church choir music. I think in its day, it was a pretty nice house. Elsewhere I will write about the dining room, the kitchen, and the cellar.

The attic was not just an attic to me but a place of mystery and imagination. The entrance to the attic was in the ceiling of the pantry. I would somehow manage to climb into the attic and take a flashlight—there was no light—and explore it, walking carefully on the rafters. I think I must have heard stories about skeletons in the attic. I might have hidden some things up there. One of these days, I should go see if these things are still there.

There were three other small rooms in the house. These were presses—today we call them closets. There were three of them in the house, one in each bedroom. Presses may have been the better name since the clothes that were jammed into these small places always had at least one crease in them, just none where you would like them. But nevertheless, we always had a freshly pressed shirt for Sunday school.

The last room that was added to the house was the bathroom, probably in 1944. The same pink plastic tile that I installed during the time that I worked at the White House Department Store (about 1956) is still in the bathroom.

CHAPTER TWO

Life on the Farm

W hen Dad transitioned to farming on the Nolting place, there was little change from the way he did things at his home. His folks gave Dad and Mother a cow for a wedding present. Henry helped Dad buy two horses, Dot and Bess. The tools were already there. Dad’s Memories Book talks more about all this.

They kept milk cows, raised pigs, and grew corn and wheat. The small farm did not provide much income, especially as their family started to grow, with Dewayne being born on September 28, 1936, and me on March 8, 1939. David came along much later on February 5, 1947.

Dad loved the land and was a good farmer, and I’m sure he would have preferred being a full-time farmer. But the farm was too small to support the needs of a growing family, and Dad feared taking on debt to buy more land.

While I never talked to Dad about it, I believe that there were two socioeconomic cataclysmic events that shaped a young man’s perspective on taking on debt. The first of these events was the Great Depression of 1929–1931 and the second event was the Great Drought of the 1930s.

As a farm family we had plenty to eat, but we were not totally isolated from the effects of the Great Depression since it played havoc with wheat prices. At the same time as the Depression, there was the beginning of a drought in the high plains (Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and eastern Colorado) that would become known as the Dust Bowl. The foundation for the Dust Bowl was created when, due to demand from worldwide shortages brought on by WWI, wheat reached an all-time high price of four dollars per bushel in 1917. This record price led to millions of acres of grassland being plowed up to grow wheat. When the drought that was to last almost a decade started in early 1930s, billions of tons of topsoil was blown away, and wheat could not be grown. By that time, due to the combined effects of the end of World War I and the Great Depression, wheat had virtually zero value. Millions of farmers who went into debt to buy land were wiped out. It would be 1947 before the wheat price would reach the four-dollar level again and 2007 before prices reached an all-time high of almost ten dollars per bushel in February of 2008.

Since expanding the farming operation was not an option to consider, Dad began to supplement his income with what would be a succession of several factory jobs, including the Golden Foundry, 1945–1950; and Nobblit Sparks (later renamed Arvin), 1945–1950. One of his jobs at Nobblit Sparks was that of night watchman. As night watchman, he made the rounds throughout the plant and would punch a clock showing what time that he was at a particular station. Sometimes Dewayne and I went with Dad and spent the night with him. I’m not sure how much company we were for him since we probably slept more than watched. Dad ended up working at Cummins for almost thirty years from 1950–1978. He worked on the night shift so he could farm during the daytime. Because the farm would always be small, there was never any thought in my mind that farming would be my career, even though that was Mother’s goal for me.

In addition to being the year that I was born, 1939 was marked by other noteworthy events: the Spanish Civil War; sit-down strikes were outlawed by the Supreme Court; Gandhi began his fast to protest British autocratic rule in India; Marian Anderson sang at the Lincoln Memorial after being refused the right to sing at the DAR Constitution Hall; first Batman comic book; Baseball Hall of Fame opened in Cooperstown, New York; Lou Gehrig retired, telling the crowd at Yankee Stadium, I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth; the last remaining Jewish enterprises in Germany were closed by the Nazis; first televised baseball game, the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers; the first jet aircraft flight; Germany attacked Poland, and the United States declared its neutrality; Gone With the Wind premiered; Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was introduced in Montgomery Ward stores; Colonel Sanders introduced his Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe at his own restaurant (prophetic?).

CHAPTER THREE

Wheat

W heat is the title of this book because, in many respects, wheat was a metaphor for our life in that so much of our lives revolved around wheat’s culture. Wheat represented work, and work defined my upbringing and shaped my life. Work is what my folks did, and it’s what I did. Work and its many facets will comprise a large part of my story. The early wheat culture involved entire neighborhoods helping their fellow neighbors. The work of wheat involved teamwork, organization, business sense, and also horse sense (in more ways than one). But wheat had a dimension other than work; it was also, as I will describe an important part of our social structure. I guess you would agree it was a pretty good school.

Wheat and corn and later soybeans also represented life. Each kernel, each seed, each bean was put into the ground with love and optimism that one wheat kernel would grow into a head with many kernels, that one corn kernel would grow into an ear with many kernels and into a stalk with several ears on it, and that each soybean would grow into a pod with several beans in it. A farmer was the proverbial optimist, always hoping and praying for a crop that was better than the previous year’s. Dad kept careful records so he knew.

Winter wheat was probably more of a cash crop for us than corn was since more of the corn was used for feed for the animals. During this time, our wheat yields were probably about fifty to seventy bushels per acre, and the price per bushel of wheat might have been around two dollars. From Dad’s notes, his record yield for wheat was eighty-seven bushels per acre in 1979. Dad stopped actively farming in 1981.

The wheat ground was prepared by plowing rather than disking. Wheat was sown in the fall, using a wheat drill pulled by two horses, Dot and Bess. Later Dot and Bess would be replaced by Dad’s first tractor—the John Deere Model H—to pull the drill. Harvest started in late June or early July when the wheat was golden and the heads full of mature grains of wheat. Until I was about five years old Dad cut the wheat using a scythe. A scythe was a long, curved tool with a blade. Dad walked the wheat field, swinging the scythe to cut down the wheat, which was then raked into rows using a horse-drawn rake. The wheat then had to be tied with twine into bundles and shocked. The shock was made up of twelve to sixteen bundles standing upright. Two wheat bundles were placed on top of the shock to shed the rain. This latter process was called, oddly enough, capping. A machine called the binder replaced the scythe. The binder, pulled by the horses, cut and tied the wheat into bundles, thereby representing quite an innovation. The wheat still had to be shocked and capped. After shocking, the wheat shocks remained in the field to dry until they were ready to be threshed. In the meantime, the wheat shocks became an attractive place for rabbits to hide, which provided us some sport and good eating.

Threshing

Farmers organized into what was called a threshing ring. I think it was also called a run. The threshing ring employed a contract thresher and his equipment, which moved from farm to farm to thresh the wheat. The farmers in the threshing ring provided much of the labor and helped each farmer in the ring with their harvest. When the thresher brought his equipment to the farm, Dad or whatever farmer was involved would tell the thresher where to set up. In our case, the location was a fenced-in area behind the old barn. In our ring, the threshing rig was owned by Jess and George Fisher. The rig was comprised of a tractor, a Case steam-driven engine with huge steel wheels and a separator. A long, leather belt connected the tractor and the separator to provide power. I have a burning memory of the time that I tried to duck under the belt but touched it instead with my head. What could have been a serious accident or worse only resulted in a headache and a big scare.

When the harvest started at a particular farm, the members of the ring would go to the wheat field to bring in the wheat. This consisted of horse-drawn bundle wagons, which had tall front and back racks onto which the wheat bundles were loaded. The bundles were pitched from the ground to the man working on the wagon. By the time the wagon was fully loaded, the load was probably getting to about fifteen feet tall, so the men on the ground were pitching the wheat bundles a long way, and the man working on the wagon had to work fast and skillfully to stack the wheat bundles. There was competition to see which wagon crew could get the biggest load of wheat bundles. When the wagons were full, they were driven to the threshing machine. The man driving the team of horses pulling the wagon was perched very high on top of the loaded wagon.

The process of threshing involved loading the wheat bundles into the threshing machine or separator. The separator separated the wheat head from the rest of the bundle. It shook the bundle, and the grain fell into a box bed wagon (this wagon is still out home). Dad