Eighty Five Years of Memories

By Ron Moser

Montana farm boy grows up from the Great Depression to now around the country and around the world, creating connections, impressions, and laughs along the way. In his description of each one of his eighty five years, Ron Moser has a few stories up his sleeve that are worth sharing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ron Moser
• Release date: Feb 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463001134

Ron Moser

BORN OCT 16, 1934, CONRAD, MT, GREW UP ON FARM 3 MILES WEST OF BRADY, WORKED AS FARMER, 40 YEARS, CARD SHARK IN HIGH SCHOOL, ROOFER, GRAIN ELEVATOR OPERATION, LUMBER YARD EMPLOYEE, MAGAZINE SALESMAN, US ARMY SECURITY GUARD, BOND UNDERWRITER, POSTAL SERVICE AT SAN FRANCISCO INT'L AIRPORT, TEAMSTER UNION CAR PARKER, CHOFEUR, , BILL COLLECTOR, CLAIMS ADJUSTOR FOR GENERAL ADJUSTMENT BUREAU, ABM MISSILE CONSTRUCTION, HIGH SCHOOL SPANISH AND GOVERNMENT TEACHER. CAMPAIGN MANAGER,, NAT'L REAL ESTATE EXCHANGE COUNSELOR, 25 YEARS, PRIVATE MONEY MANAGEMENT BROKER, NAT'L CERTIFIED BUSINESS COUNSELOR, CENSUS TAKER IN 2010, DRIVER FOR CASEY FAMILY PROGRAM, AUTHOR

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INTRODUCTION

For my 85th birthday, my cousin Cheryl wrote me a poem because she knows I love to write corny poems, have so done for over 50 years. The first one I ever published was in the Great Falls Tribune in December, 1967. In Cheryl's poem to me, she suggested, because I have a vivid memory over my entire life, that I should write a book of memories, both to keep me actively positive, and for our posterity to perhaps learn a bit of family history. I thank Cheryl for that, I think it's a great idea, so this is the beginning.

Both my parents, Rudolph Moser and Edna Kauk, were born of Germans from the Ukraine. My paternal grandparents, Adolf Moser and Johanna Gemar, both mostly grew up in the Ukraine; he coming to Colorado at 21, she with her parents at 15. Great Grandpa Gemar arrived in the U.S. in 1905 with his wife and most of their children, leaving behind half interest in an 800-acre farm. From this, he still had enough cash to buy an irrigated farm in Colorado. Then in 1909, he homesteaded 14 miles north of Choteau, Montana, and promptly sold 10-acres to the Milwaukee Road to establish the town of Agawam. My maternal grandparents were 2nd generation in the U.S., Grandpa Lee Kauk, born in Sutton, Nebraska in 1887, and Grandma Anna Klein, born in 1892 near Odessa, Texas.

My father, Rudolph, was born 1907 at Yuma, Colorado, my mother, Edna Kauk, born 1911 near Butler, Oklahoma. They were married on March 12, 1931, in Great Falls, attended by my dad's identical twin brother, Gustave, and his wife Bertha, also German, whose parents were also from Ukraine, the John Kellers.

Things were damned tough in 1931, there was no honeymoon, and they all returned to the farm Adolph and Johanna had just purchased southeast of Agawam, where they shared the bunkhouse. Each couple separated was from the other by a sheet stretched across a small rope in the middle of the room. The bathroom was an outhouse shared by them, grandpa, grandma, and their other six children.

Not long thereafter, Gus and Bertha had the opportunity to rent grandpa Keller's homestead about 30 miles south east of Brady, and mt parents rented great Grandpa Gemar's homestead a quarter mile south west of Agawam.

My mother told me the house was so poorly built, in winter when she opened the cupboard, snow blew in through the cracks and it got so cold at night that the water in the reservoir on the Coleman Range froze over. That was my first home after I was born. At the home of a midwife in Conrad on October 16, 1934, I arrived. Dr. DuBois’ (pronounced do boys) fee was $25. But, because he arrived late, Dad paid him $15 and gave the other $10 to the midwife. Coincidentally, my wife Chantal's delivering doctor in France was Dr DuBois (pronounced do bwaw).

The Gemar homestead land was a lot of gravel, so when dad got the opportunity to rent the 800-acre A.J. McNeely farm west of Brady, we moved there in January 1936. In the same January 1936, while Mother and Dad were playing pinochle with McNeely's grandson, Mike Nash and his wife Marie, the farmhouse burned to the ground. I think the temperature was 20 below zero.

This brings me to my first memory of life, though very small. We had to move into a 12' by 24' granary. I remember being cold sleeping between my parents, yet able to see the only heat coming from a kerosene burning stove a few feet away. I was 15 months old, I can still see that vision.

My second memory is of several months later, playing near the basement foundation of the burned down home. At 70, Mr. McNeely the landlord began rebuilding, alone, a new 26’ by 26’ home with the $1,000 insurance he had collected. He succeeded, giving us a fine 2-bedroom home that would serve us for 11 years, but still no electricity or running water.

For drinking and cooking water, we had to haul it about 15 miles from Aldrich Springs or the Teton River. At that time, we had a kerosene lamp at night, followed by a much better Aladdin lamp, and finally, a miraculous gas lamp hanging from the middle of the kitchen ceiling. In about 1942, my dad bought a light plant and wind charger to charge the batteries, but it rarely did the job, so we had to listen to a gasoline motor mostly all day long just to have one electric bulb replacing the gas lamp.

While food was still kept in an icebox, for which one of my jobs became to pull a chunk of ice from a sawdust room in the barn in my little red wagon, to the house for my dad to then carry it in, I also got to take the melted ice bucket underneath to the chicken troughs, because no water was wasted. For bathing, it was once a week on Saturdays in a round galvanized tub in the middle of the kitchen floor. The bath water warmed with water from the stove reservoir, first me, then Mother, Dad last in the same water... my mother always said cleanliness is next to godliness.

The wind charger became one of my favorite climbing structures, it was about 30 feet high. I shared it with the rope in the barn that went 28 feet from the hayloft floor to the ceiling, it's main purpose to bring hay from hayracks via a 50-foot-long rail inside the barn peak. I'd climb that rope using only hands that developed enough strength in my body, that later, in army basic training allowed me to rank 2nd in pull-ups, at 14, out of 105 men in my barracks. The hayloft was also one of favorite gathering places for me and my 45 cousins at family dinners, as well as first sexual explorations, growing up on a farm was certainly one of the most fun and helpful guides to living in my life.

At this point, I want to point out all the names: Moser, Gemar, Kauk, Keller, Klein, and Jesser are because all of these families originated in Germany, in different locales, all were invited by Czaress Catherine the Great, of Russia, because she was German born, to come settle and develop the Ukraine, that Russia had recently taken from someone else, Turkey, I think. This all began about 1799 when the first Germans went to the Ukraine, many via boats on the Danube. Others were the Weists, Zimblemans, Trosts, Bitzes, Weikums, Schlepps, Horsts, Wohls, and many more, but most I've mentioned here seemed to continue to follow one another and not only hang out together, but intermarry among one another, down to this day. Two of my dad's sisters married Weists, a Weikum married a Keller, his sister married a Weikum, a Trost married a Kauk, her cousin married my aunt Rosie Kauk, and on and on and on. My cousin Cheryl Kauk is married to Gordon Schlepp, Weists, Zimblemans, Gemars are intertwined, and on and on again.

My mother was one of 86 first cousins. Before she came to Montana with parents and siblings in 1927 to stay, she was very well loved by many aunts, uncles and cousins in Oklahoma, so, when I was transferred to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma in 1954, they remembered her and transferred that love and care to me, enlightening me to unending family history. I've had 3 birthdays in Oklahoma, which has given me hundreds of extremely fond memories, and now, I think I'll begin a new chapter to adhere to cousin Cheryl's fine suggestion of recording at least one memory of as many of each year of the 85 I've lived!

I hope the reader will find something among them to learn from, laugh at, cry with, or hopefully to encourage him/her to live life to the fullest, and appreciate the opportunity. I certainly do appreciate, as I've had more opportunities than 99% of all people who have ever lived, as I was reminded by another cousin/brother, Robert (Red) McDermand, about 65 years ago.

I began by sharing memories of my mom, then my own, beginning in 1936. One of my best memories of 1937 is of George Ammen, a man my dad hired for harvest that turned out to be nothing, hailed and burned out. He was a kind man, who child sat me, probably only three or four times, to allow my parents to do what they had to do a time or two. He was very nice, played with me, gave me candy, etc.

My dad often told the story of him, mother, Albert and Nellie Schlepp, their best friends at the time, going to Yellowstone park, to take a break before what they thought would be a big harvest. Dad had $25, loaned Albert $15 that would allow him to share in the gas and cabins. I stayed with cousins Barbara and Bud east of Brady, where we all slept next to each other perpendicular to normal. I remember Uncle Bob threatening to spank Barbara and me for locking Bud in the outhouse. I loved staying at their farm because it was filled with abandoned cars, trucks, a threshing machine (that we later pretended was a tank), a steam engine tractor, a big reservoir to play on, and more. We had many, many happy times there.

While my parents were in Yellowstone, the crops were almost completely wiped out by both hail and drought. My dad's share that year was $70, he had payments to make on a new John Deere D tractor, plow, drill, disk, and Minneapolis/Moline combine.

My dad always paid his bills, and so the dealers told him he could wait until the next year to make payments. For other bills he began trapping muskrats, and made $500 in two weeks trapping muskrats, but he worked almost 24 hours a day that winter. The next spring he and Albert both got jobs for Fred Lewis building the highway from Brady to Conrad, and another job topping beets.

PART 1. THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS

Chapter One

1938

1938 was a bumper crop, Dad raised 12,000 bushels of wheat, it probability allowed him the credit to buy a '35 Chevrolet 4-door sedan that he also used to carry tools and a five-gallon bucket of grease to the wheat field. One day he took me along, left me in the car while he was on the combine. Wanting to help (l was almost 4) I had watched him fill the spackle like grease guns with a small stick left otherwise in the loosely shut bucket. So, I took that stick, dipped it repeatedly into the bucket, then applied grease to all the side windows of the car. I was shocked that when he came back to the car and he wasn't happy about it. Mother was furious because she had to clean it all off, wanted to spank me, but I crawled to the top of the car shed via it's lean-to that held both the coal shed and Maytag washing machine area. By the time she convinced me to come down, she was actually laughing

1939

I think my parents began to buy the farm from Mr. McNeely, the homestead 320 and the Kinkaid place a mile and half north west, west of Goodins. One day, Dad drove his model A truck to the Kinkaid place, taking me along. I was standing up in the seat trying to watch him load straw from the straw stack left over from harvest out the back window. Suddenly, he was at the door, grabbed me, threw me over his shoulder, and began running, I soon realized why when I saw a great fire erupting around the truck, it's exhaust had lit the straw when he backed into it, he hadn't noticed until it was too late, he grabbed me just in time to get far enough away before it caught the gas line, blowing the truck up. Dad was still running as hard as he could, jumped the scot ditch, kept running until we were in Goodin's yard, Mrs. Goodin had already spotted the fire, had backed her ford out of the garage, and drove us home. Dad had to go to Shelby to buy a new secondhand Model A that will provide a couple more stories with me driving later on.

The year ended at Christmas at Uncle Jake and Aunt Rosie's, a mile northeast of our home, where I was taken care of frequently by aunts Rosie, Olga, Lydia and Hilda, also going to the fields with Uncle Jake and Reuben. Uncle Jake and I shared listening to The Lone Ranger at 6:30 pm. We were all there for Christmas Eve dinner, where Santa Claus had left me a big wheeled red tricycle, a major gift in life.

Chapter Two

1940

Early in the spring one day, I was furious with my mother, so it was the first time I left home, I got a little over a mile away on that red trike before mother realized what I'd done, she picked me up near the bridge going over the Brady ditch, took me to Aunt Rosie's, all told me that wasn't a good solution.

Reuben was always willing to listen to this little boy, always sympathized with me, would chat with me for hours. Of course, I had no idea he was mentally disabled, but very caring. He always had a crush on my mother.

Despite his disability, he could also speak German, worked for my dad a lot, and frequently, after dinner when Dad had left the table, Reuben would turn to my mother and say in German, why don't you get rid of him?

I also spent a lot of time at Mooney and Mammo, my Kauk grandparents. I was really close