The Farm That Adopted Me

By Guy Loudermilk

About the Book
“What are we going to do with the kids?” Dad’s statement frightened me. We didn’t know Mom had been given an opportunity to visit her Navy sis-ter wife, Sheryl, living in the Panama Canal Zone. How in blazes does a small town, 15-year-old boy, who was riding his bike around town one week, end up in the middle of Indiana driving a huge old tractor the next?
From tennis shoes to clod hoppers?
From shorts to bib overalls?
From ball caps to straw hats?
From playing all day to working all day?
From ignoring girls to falling in love?
Rob is about to find out about the phrase, ‘culture shock’.

About the Author
Guy Loudermilk is 89 years old. He is married and has a family which ex-tends through great grandchildren. Guy graduated from Nappanee, Indi-ana High School in 1951 and spent four years with the United States Air Force, earning an Honorable Discharge in 1956. His duties allowed him to spend two years in Japan getting in and out of an active war zone. He mar-ried a NYC girl, then worked for a year and a half, working in a cabinet factory before entering Ball State Teacher’s College in 1957 with the assist of the GI Bill. Guy met his first employer on a cold spring morning on the doorstep of a barbershop in Muncie, Indiana. Dr. McKenzie offered him a job on the spot to begin teaching in the Fall of 1960. As he taught children to use words, he found himself enjoying putting words of paper. He taught or administrated Elementary schools for thirty-eight years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RoseDog Books
• Release date: Jul 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889255024

Book preview

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The contents of this work, including, but not limited to, the accuracy of events, people, and places depicted; opinions expressed; permission to use previously published materials included; and any advice given or actions advocated are solely the responsibility of the author, who assumes all liability for said work and indemnifies the publisher against any claims stemming from publication of the work.

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2023 by Guy Loudermilk

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, downloaded, distributed, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Acknowledgments

Sister Diane Carrollo, S.G.L. for the original inspiration to try.

Steve Freeze, A+ Computer Doctor for keeping the tools working and improving my understanding of writing programs.

Nicole Suprak, should I ever write another book, I will be looking for you as my editor. Thank you.

Kay Raag who read and kept the drivel from showing up as miss said or miss spoken.

My daughter, Suzy, whose unrelenting encouragement and belief never let me quit.

My wife, Terry, who would never let me claim to be a starving writer.

Brenda McDonald, my consultant with Dorrance without whose patience, I would be still swimming about.

And finally my cousin Birt who reminded me that a chicken only lays one egg a day.

just a Guy

I was a Townie … according to my country cousins. Someone who knew diddly squat about anything. That’s the way one of the best summers of my life started. One of the most memorable as well.

My cousins were right about their world.

Oh, I had farm friends and schoolmates whose parents were farmers. I lived in a small town surrounded by square miles of the blackest, richest, growing soil in the state of Indiana. It was so rich with plant matter that it would actually burn. It burned!! It was called muck locally. In a more solid form, it might be called peat, which has been used as fuel for heating homes and cooking food, probably as long as early man had stuck a shovel in the ground.

A muck fire was dreaded by all. They burned deeply into the ground and dense smoke would occasionally blow over highways and close them down. Those fires have been known to smolder and smoke for years.

We Townies would ride our bikes out of town to play with our farm friends in their barns, but I learned very little or nothing about farming. But knowing not to mess with fire … that was a given.

I was fifteen that summer. I hadn’t learned to drive. That wasn’t to happen until Driver’s Ed in the fall. Or so I would have thought, if I thought about it at all.

So how in blazes’ name did I end up spending six weeks of the summer on a farm in central Indiana? And why did my sister got shuttled like a ping-pong ball back and forth between home and Battle Creek, Michigan?

HOW AND WHY

To get the answers to those questions, I’ll have to pull in a little family history.

My dad was an outstanding student and had excelled at all sports at Knox High School holding several state track records until I had a family and profession of my own to see the last of them broken.

After he graduated from Knox High School, he enrolled in Indiana Central College located in Indianapolis to study law.

He made the football team and he broke his left arm. It was never perfectly straight after that.

While he was recovering from his injury, his dad, Albert, was working in a train yard in Battle Creek, Michigan, and fell underneath a rolling train car. His right leg was amputated above the knee. The prosthesis was an unbendable wooden leg. So Dad had to leave school to help with his younger siblings who were still in school in Knox.

The country was just beginning to show recovery from a long depression.

Dad was working in