As a young boy, I loved to dig in the dirt.
I wanted to see how deep I could dig, and I wanted to dig a foxhole for our ‘neighborhood’ military battles. I also had a couple holes under our raised porch where I stored my treasures and ran my toy trucks.
Perhaps I had been influenced by my father. He told me the story of going back to the woods and cutting several large beams from the trees and transporting them to the house. He then obtained several railroad tracks and created a framework to lift our house. Grandpa Adler was a contractor and I’m sure he helped with supervision.
Once the house was in the air, as the story went, he used his small Ferguson tractor and a slip scoop to dig out a basement. Apparently, the block mason failed to show, so dad laid the concrete block walls for the basement and poured a concrete floor. A shallow trench around the outside edge of the inside floor drained any water to a sump pump hole. The house was then returned to the new foundation and a stairway was built to the basement.
The basement held the family’s canned goods and a 50-gallon wooden barrel used age apple cider into vinegar. Dad said I watched the operation as a young boy, but I was too young to remember what actually took place. It was not until he was in his 90s that he added the new fact that 20 of the neighbors came to help. It was actually their shoveling that loaded the dirt onto the scoop. I had always thought the scoop was used and only dad and grandpa were there. “Barn raising” was common back then when the neighbors pitched in to help one another on many of the tasks that needed done.
When I was older, Dad gave me the digging “cure.” We routinely bought two-week-old dairy calves from a neighbor. Dad didn’t have a truck, so he just brought them home in the trunk of the car. We then bottle-fed them until they were old enough to eat hay and a chop mixture. When they first arrived, they were fixed so we could raise steers for the beef market. Apparently one very large Brown Swiss steer was not appropriately fixed and happened to breed several of the Herford cows on the farm.
When calving time came, the calves were too large for a normal delivery, and despite our help in the delivery, they died in the process. By law, dead animals are required to be burned, buried, or rendered.
You guessed it; I got the job to bury the dead calves. It only took two calves for me to get the cure.