Dairy Farming in 1948

A Memoir

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 Dairy Farming in 1948

A Memoir

In 1947 I transferred from Boston Latin School to Jamaica Plain High School, to pursue
college preparatory studies in animal husbandry. I’d decided I would one day raise
horses.
In June of 1948 I completed my junior year with good grades, but full credit for
that year wouldn’t be mine until I had earned my work credits. This meant that, for
thirty dollars a month plus room and board, I’d spend the summer at hard labor on a
dairy farm in central Vermont. (This was the going wage for cowboys during the mid-
1800s, and they may have worked as hard as I was about to, but I doubt it.)
From a housing project in South Boston to a dairy farm may seem a wrenching
relocation, but I’d always been fond of forest and stream. Not that I’d have much time
to enjoy them, as it turned out.
Aside from a cinder in my eye that felt like a pebble, I recall little of that train
trip, my first, but it seems to me I left Boston's North Station on the Boston & Maine
railroad, and at some point changed to the Vermont Central. Just after noon the next
day, belching soot and hissing steam, the old locomotive chuffed into Randolph
station, hauling a motley train of passenger cars predating World War I. This train,
Vermont Central's best, was symptomatic of a nationwide fatal decline in railroad
passenger service. Sleeping cars were commonly referred to as "rolling tenements."
Ninety percent of them belonged in museums. Most of the day-coaches belonged on
scrap heaps. Railroad owners blamed the war, but long before 1941 the emphasis
was already on freight, the goal a quick return on investment. Only nine hundred new
sleeping cars had been built in the last sixteen years, most of them for the private (and
presumably business) use of the twenty-five largest railroads. Railroad management
refused to invest in new rolling stock for passengers. The shortsighted greed of
executives and major stockholders was ruining America's railroads.
I detrained and stood gazing at the Green Mountains, which loomed at the edge
of town like a verdant glacier. Obscuring the sun with a cloud of stinking black coal
smoke, the old locomotive lurched ahead and took up the slack. Crashing blows ran
the length of the train and were reflected back to the locomotive, then the train started
up the grade, its ancient passenger cars squealing and groaning. Slowly the
locomotive gathered speed, its big drive wheels alternately grabbing and slipping,
grabbing and slipping, its engine laboring then racing, and steam spurting from
exhaust valves with a rhythm sounding for all the world like a soft-shoe dancer doing a
sand shuffle.

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 I watched the train make the grade and chug out of sight around a thickly
wooded curve, then I turned and looked over the town. It was a small town, a village
really. I inhaled the clean piny air, and watched a big hawk turning stiff-winged spirals
high above the tracks. Another boy might already be missing the city, but aside from
Billy and Whitey Bulger's beautiful sister, Jean, who for Christmas received a bath
powder and cologne set that left me impoverished for two months, there was nothing
in South Boston to hold me. On his deathbed my brother told about Whitey Bulger
chasing me down the street with a knife. I don't recall this, and Jim was heavily
drugged, but if it happened, it may have been because I had the temerity to knock on
the Bulger apartment door and gift his sister. Lord, she was a beauty, reminiscent of
Eva Marie Saint in my memory. (She’d later be voted the prettiest girl at South Boston
High School.) I doubt Jean even knew my name. She accepted my gift, though.
A mud-caked jeep pulled into the train depot parking lot. Out stepped a rangy
long-nosed man with a red creased neck. He was wearing a peaked cap and bib
coveralls, both striped like mattress tick. Sweaty half-moons darkened the armpits of
his faded blue shirt. His rolled-up sleeves exposed thick hairy wrists. He raised a
hand. "Jerry Gormley?"
"Yes sir." I walked to the jeep.
"How do," the man said, extending his hand. "Howard MacDougall." The
farmer was several inches taller than me, well over six feet. We shook hands. "I was
just about to go get a cold drink," I said.
"I'm losin' considerable work time as it is."
"It was a long hot train ride. I'm parched."
"Do tell." MacDougall gave me a crooked little grin and got into the jeep. Now I
understood what a high school senior had meant when he referred to the compulsory
farm work as white slavery. I threw my duffel into the back and got in. We left town
on a dusty unpaved road that wound through cultivated green valleys flanked by
wooded hills. Each farm we passed looked pretty much like the ones before it; a
tree-shaded white clapboard house set back from the road, a raw weathered barn and
stable on the opposite side of the road, herds of cows grazing some distance from the
buildings, narrow stands of high trees forming windbreaks between fields, and stone
walls marking property lines and subdivisions. All at once I missed the sea, its
absence more palpable than its presence had ever been for me. Most of all, I missed
its cooling breezes and exotic aromas.
The train ride had been long, hot and dirty, my shirt was plastered against my
skin, my temper was badly frayed, and all I could smell was manure. I commented on
this to MacDougall, who flared his nostrils and took a deep breath, as if smelling his
environment for the first time. "Oh, you mean the dressin'."
"Dressing?"
"Manure."
"I thought modern farmers used chemical fertilizer."
"Sure we do, but manure's free."

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 "And plentiful, by the smell of it. Any kids my age here?"
"Nearest one's a fur piece."
"How big a farm do you have?"
"Six hundred acres."
"How many cows?"
"Thutty head, 'bout twenty fresh, t'others heifers." A pickup passed, blinding us
with dust. "Ro-ud's gettin' a mite dusty," MacDougall observed. "Time fer anotha
oilen'."
MacDougall's speech, laced with idiom and farming jargon, was made all the
more foreign by a twanging sing-song drawl. I understood barely half of what the man
said. I said nothing more for the rest of the trip.
We passed a dozen farms, then he parked the jeep under two soaring oak trees
and said, "Heuh 'tis." An old black and white collie slunk out from beneath the porch
and approached us with head low and tail wagging sheepishly. I knelt and greeted the
dog, which wriggled and whined as if seldom petted. "She's a work dog," MacDougall
said with obvious disapproval.
"Does that mean I shouldn't pet her?"
"Jes' don't coddle her."
A boy and girl, towheads both, came out of the house and stood staring at me,
their faces screwed up against the sun's glare. The boy was about twelve, the girl
eleven. "My boy Howie," said MacDougall. Then, like an afterthought, "And this here's
Sam." The girl smiled and said, "Short for Samantha." The boy tugged at her halter and
said, "Sam wore her new tit holders jes' fer you." The girl giggled. Feigning
nonchalance at the boy's language, I squatted in front of the girl and told her she was
too pretty to be called Sam. Blushing, she locked her arms behind her and swung
from side to side, then dabbed a kiss on my cheek and ran giggling into the house.
Her brother said, "Mush," and headed toward the barn.
I was introduced to Mrs. MacDougall, a florid sweaty woman of ample
proportions, then was shown to my room and given an hour to unpack and change. I
hung my good clothes in the old chifforobe, donned a blue denim shirt, dungarees and
work boots, then went out to the kitchen and said I was hungry. Mrs. MacDougall,
who ended most declarative statements with heh-heh -- "Lunch was over an hour ago,
heh-heh" -- fed me a cold baked-bean sandwich and a large glass of what looked like
milk. I gagged. "What is this stuff?" The woman gaped. "Land sake, boy, you mean to
say you never drank milk afore?" I was accustomed to thinned-down pasteurized city
milk. This was whole raw milk, so thick and flavorful that it took some getting used to.
MacDougall took me out to the stable and showed me how to harness the big
draft mares, Cleo and Cloe. They had to be harnessed with Cleo on the left because
she was going blind in her right eye. Cleo immediately asserted herself by standing on
my foot. MacDougall grinned as I cursed and grabbed the horse behind the knee with
both hands to lift her big hoof. Cleo feigned innocence, then nipped me when I turned
my back.

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 The other mare nickered and nuzzled my neck. I liked the oaty smell of her
breath and the velvety skin of her muzzle. As with Samantha, it was love at first sight.
Having often harnessed the milkman's horse when I helped him deliver milk in
the city, I was quick to master the double harness. We hitched the mares to a wagon
and rode up a hill behind the house to a potato field where MacDougall told me to
pick rocks and add them to a stone wall in progress. He explained how to
voice-command the mares. Come up, girls meant go ahead. Come up a step meant
just this. Back, girls. Back a step, girls. Haw for left turn, gee for right. Back haw,
back gee. And the only familiar terms, stay and whoa. "Don't back-turn 'em too sharp
or you'll bust my wagon tongue." MacDougall turned and walked back down to the
barn.
I soon discovered that the place smelled of a lot more than manure; my nostrils
caught the fine Christmas-tree scents of pine and spruce, the semenlike aroma of
newmown hay, and a variety of wildflowers combining their fragrances into one fine
nosegay. I liked working alone with the mares. Working with horses always
established an ancient sense of pace. A few modern conveniences aside, I had
stepped back into the nineteenth century.
The frost heaves of winter had raised a good crop of rocks. By sunset, which
came early in the valley, I had added three wagonloads to the wall, at no time using
the reins. MacDougall returned and grunted his approval of the wall's growth, then we
rode back to the stable. While I curried and fed the horses, MacDougall stood outside,
hands cupped to mouth, calling "Kaboysh," a call evolved over generations from Come
bossie. Each farmer had his own version, to which only his cows would respond. This
avoided confusion on neighboring farms.
From their day pasture a quarter-mile downhill, brown and white Ayshire cattle
came head-bobbing up the lane. First came those in need of milking, their udders so
swollen that the cows had to walk with hind legs splayed. Next came heifers not yet
freshened. The collie was sent after a few heifers lallygagging in the pasture. The old
dog circled down through the tall alfalfa, got behind the heifers, and drove them
kicking and cantering up the lane. MacDougall said, "That's okay fer heifers, but mind
you cain't let 'er run milk cows. Bloodies the milk and we hefta dump it."
With cupfuls of nutty mash the children enticed the cows into stalls and closed
stanchions around their necks. Most of them seemed to have been waiting for this
opportunity to defecate. Their dung, loosened by green fodder, splashed and stank. I
wrinkled my nose and grimaced. One cow tried to kick me. Two put the squeeze on
me. It took all my strength to push them apart. "They're testin' you, boy. Jes' show
'em who's boss."
The next cow that kicked me got a left hook to the rump that made her bawl
and favor the leg for a while. MacDougall glared. "I an't ahter sayin' break their
goddam legs."
We washed the cows' teats, slipped suction cups over them, and by means of a
vacuum pump drew the milk into a stainless steel collector, which we emptied

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through paper filters into big milk cans, which were refrigerated for pick-up by the
creamery truck. Each cow gave some fifteen quarts morning and night. The machine
milked two cows at a time, but left in each a quart or two, which had to be stripped
out by hand. I stripped out only seven cows to MacDougall's thirteen, yet at dinner my
fingers were so stiff that I could barely use knife and fork.
Mrs. MacDougall's cooking was, like herself, plain but abundant. Each week's
culinary high point would prove to be Saturday evening franks, baked beans and
brown bread, eaten on the porch from paper plates so that the Missus could get a
head start on prettifying herself for the Grange Hall dance.
After dinner I was shown how to care for twenty hens and a young pig, then the
children took me up into the loft to see their pet rabbits. To my amazement, Howie
asked, "Didja ever see rabbits fuck?" When I said no, he let a buck mount a doe. After
a brief but furious coupling, the buck fell onto its side, screaming. Samantha looked
up at me, her face the picture of dead-pan innocence. "Sure looks like fun, don't it,
Jerry?" I said I was tired and went to my room.

The two-man saw has been around since the middle ages. This is called a 'cross-cut' saw because
it’s designed to cut across the grain, for example, to fell a tree. A 'whip saw' or 'rip saw'
would cut with the grain to make lumber. Note the combinations of teeth and 'rakers'. The teeth
cut. The rakers scrape the cuttings away. Every saw must address two problems; cutting, and
purging the sawdust from the cut without binding up the saw in the process. This isn’t easy with
a two-man saw designed to cut in both directions.

Each day followed the same hellish routine -- arise at five AM to the blare of
radio march music, do the milking and other morning chores, then eat breakfast, then
take the horses into the forest and spend the rest of the morning harvesting cedars for
a silo MacDougall planned to build. It was back-breaking work, wielding the two-man
saw, sledge-hammering big iron wedges into the cut to keep it from binding the saw,
then limbing the felled trees with heavy double-bladed axes. The heat made me reel,
but MacDougall would suffer no rest periods until a log was as clean as a whistle and
ready to haul. The farmer, thirty-five if he was a day, set such a demanding pace, and
with such ease, that I was damned if I would let the old man show me up. This
seemingly modest man showed a prideful side, an inward yet manifest exultation that

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 he could perform the most arduous tasks, suffer
the worst heat and biting insects, all without
complaint. This attitude was common among
farmers then. They wore the evidence of their
hard life like a badge of membership in an
exclusive fraternity.
I had no desire to join this brotherhood of
sweat and pain, but I suffered in silence just to
wipe the gloating grin off MacDougall's face. Each
morning we felled and limbed two large trees,
skidded the logs out to the road with horse-drawn
chains, and stacked them for later transport to a
sawmill.
Between fellings we visited one of the
farm's many springs. Never had I tasted anything
like cold spring water, fragrant with leaves and
Felling axes
evergreen needles. I often saw deer tracks in the
moist earth edging the springs.
Despite MacDougall's occasional reference
to "bars" and a cougar dubbed the Randolph Panther, I felt very much at home in the
forest. One morning I could have sworn I saw something watching me from a nearby
thicket. I wiped the sweat from my eyes and looked again, but whatever I had seen
was gone. Lest I give the farmer gloating license to say that the city slicker would soon
be seeing cougars and bears behind every tree, I said nothing.
Even worse than logging was haying, for this was done in open fields, in the
broiling sun, and would continue through much of the summer, each field yielding two
crops of alfalfa and clover. The hay was mowed with a chattering cutter bar, left to
dry, then gathered into windrows with a rotating side-delivery rake. Mowing machine,
rake, and wagon were horse-drawn. All other work, including mowing with scythes
what the machine missed, and pitching the dried hay onto the wagon with four-tined
forks, required considerable manpower and sweat. The only powered farm
equipment consisted of the milking machine and the jeep.
Howie spread the hay on the wagon
while Samantha rode on the driver's seat,
giggling whenever I looked her way. Each load
of hay brought in from the fields had to be
pitched again from wagon to haylofts in the
barn. It was hot dusty work. The remedy for
dust-parched throats was vinegar water, drunk
Summer 1948. Me, Dolly (who disliked me), & from a common one-gallon jug slung beneath
already antique haying rake. By this time I had the wagon.
muscles in my stools, and spoke like a fahmah.
As weeks passed and the lower lofts filled

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up, the hay was lifted to the upper lofts by a jeep-powered track fork which carried a
third of a wagonload. As each big load came rumbling along the track and I yanked a
trip line to drop the hay, then spread it by hand, the air became filled with angry
wasps. I would spend many hours in the loft, choked by dust, exhausted by heat, and
stung by wasps. Almost daily I threatened to quit, but this meant losing credits and
having to repeat my junior year, and MacDougall knew it. I had no choice but to stay.

One day MacDougall and I helped a Franco-American neighbor, Dubois, geld a

draft stallion. "An't enough Duboize bought a stallion," said MacDougall as we drove to
the next farm, "he even tried to work it 'longside his mare. Course, with the stallion
hellbent on mountin' that mare, Frenchy ended up spendin' more in busted harness
than he saved buyin' that fool hoss."
We arrived just as the veterinarian was getting out of his mud-spattered Land
Rover. He was a balding man with a barrel chest and forearms as thick as a budding
girl's thighs. MacDougall, myself and Dubois, a smallish bearded man, hobbled the
stallion and held it steady while the veterinarian injected a pint of anesthetic into the
animal's neck. The stallion swayed like a drunk, but remained standing. The
veterinarian administered another half-pint of anesthetic. The stallion's knees
buckled. We pushed him over and the veterinarian loosened the hind hobble enough
to spread the stallion's legs. Just as the doctor made his first cut, the horse kicked and
the scalpel laid open the back of the man's hand. Bleeding more profusely than his
patient, he bound his hand with a kerchief and finished the job, shucking the stallion's
gonads like oysters. Awed by the ton of raw male power I felt shuddering under me, I
looked down and saw the stallion watching me. I couldn’t bring myself to look the
horse in the eye.
The stallion revived and was released into a pasture. Immediately he cornered
the mare and tried to mount her. "He'll lose interest in a few weeks," said the
veterinarian. I felt myself an accessory to a crime against nature.
Mrs. Dubois came out and bandaged the doctor's wound. In halting English,
Dubois thanked everyone for their help, then went into the house. MacDougall spat.
"Least he might do is offer us some hahd cida,"
he muttered as he revved up the jeep and spun
onto the road. "He puts up barrels of it. Damn
good, too."

Whenever a cow near term failed to

Summer 1948. Me with new calf. Gordie with
unknown, probably one of his rabbits. Probable
photographer, Mona, Gordie’s kid sister.
show up for milking, the children and I went
looking for her. We usually found her at the
forest's edge, half wild and jumpy as hell, trying
to lead us away from her calf, and charging us
when we got too close to it, which of course
told us roughly where it was hidden.

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Somewhere in the tall grass near the woods we’d find it curled up, as scent-free and
still as a newborn fawn, obeying instincts undimmed by millenia of domestication.
And while the children distracted the cow, I’d sling the calf over my shoulders and
carry it up to the barn, there to wean it by getting it to suck my thumb in a pail of milk,
and then to drink from the pail. Bull calves were sold for veal within weeks. Heifers
were nurtured toward annual production approaching ten thousand quarts of milk.
When a cow dried up, it was sold for beef to an abattoir and received as its final
reward a pointed sledgehammer through the forehead. No place for sentiment in
farming.
One day it rained hard on the Dubois side of the property line, but not on the
MacDougall side. I could literally go from dry to drenched by hopping the stone wall.
It was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen. I told MacDougall it was his
punishment for enslaving city boys. "Never again will your farm get rain," I said.
MacDougall just smiled his crooked smile and told me to get back to work, but I
figured the man was superstitious, and caught him casting worried glances as the rain
continued to observe the boundary line for another fifteen minutes, then stopped
altogether.
The farm offered so few diversions that I often spent my free time, what little I
had, with the children. We watched the farm's half-wild cats hunt rats in the barn, and
bet how many mice would run for cover when we opened a feed bin. We fished for
brook trout and watched great blue herons hunt frogs in the brook. We found a fox
den and watched the kits at play. Sometimes, just after dark, I waylaid big rats feeding
at the chickens' trough. While I dispatched my share with an ax handle and the dog
broke backs, the children watched through cracks in the door, and the hens on their
roosts looked back and forth like spectators at a tennis match. The record night's toll
was ten rats, which I photographed on the lawn next morning with the old collie sitting
proudly beside them. The ritual hunts seemed to give the old dog a new lease on life.

That Saturday night, I accompanied the MacDougalls to a square dance at the Grange
hall. As we entered the hall, I could imagine myself in a much earlier age, for the farm
wives presented a colorful tableau not much changed in two hundred years. Wearing
girlish hair bows and patent leather dancing shoes, they were dressed to the nines in
striped and checked gingham dresses reaching to the floor. The men were attired as if
for work, though with overalls and shirts freshly laundered, boots tallowed, and red
kerchiefs worn like ascots at the open necks of their blue denim shirts. The work-like
dress was appropriate, for the farmers danced as hard as they labored, responding
with embarassed extroversion to the caller's chants of Allemande and Doceydoe. By
the end of the second set the hall reeked with underarm odor, but this was accepted
then, and it smelled no worse than the average city subway car or trolley at rush hour.
I checked out the local girls and was hard-eyed by the local boys, but saw nothing
worth risking a fight for. The only girl who caught my eye, a darkly pretty thing with
horn-rimmed glasses and nice lips, looked barely twelve. The few times I danced, I

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The Percheron is a breed of draft horses that originated in the Perche valley in
northern France. Percherons are usually gray or black in color. They’re well-muscled,
intelligent, and willing to work. They were originally bred for war, but came to be
used for pulling stage coaches, and later for agriculture and hauling heavy goods. In
the late 1700s and early 1800s, Arabian blood was added to the breed. Percherons
accounted for 70% of the draft horse population in the United States, but their
numbers fell after World War II. T his file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2 . 0
G e n e r i c l i c e nse.

two-stepped with Samantha, who was clearly as proud as punch to be chosen over
the older girls.

Monday through Saturday, I worked from dawn until well after dark. Even on Sunday I
had morning and evening chores, but the rest of each Sunday was my own. My first

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day off had been a day of rest, but on the next I packed a lunch and rode Cloe
bareback into the forest.
As the trees closed in behind us, I felt a keen sense of escape. The air beneath
the forest canopy was dark and cool, fragrant with evergreen and mellow with
birdsong. The horse's scent must have masked mine, for many animals let us
approach quite close. The old mare moved like an overweight Arabian, head and tail
high, ears pricked and nostrils flared to catch every sound and smell. Clearly she was
loving every moment.
Before long we were in deep timber. Great trees soared, some a hundred feet
tall and as straight as temple columns. Between them slanted brilliant sunbeams,
through which flashed birds and insects of every description. I saw many white-tail
deer. In the cover of deep timber the deer seldom broke into a run, but instead
skulked from tree to tree. At one point a prime buck, antlers in velvet, paused in a
shaft of sunlight and licked his nostrils to get a better scent of horse and rider.
All morning we wandered logging roads and any smaller trails that Cloe could
negotiate. When the sun stood overhead, we came to a stream where a doe and her
fawn were cooling themselves. The deer bounded off into the forest. I stopped at the
stream and stripped to the waist. As I sat on the sun-dappled bank to eat my lunch,
the mare moved to higher ground and entered a nearby meadow to graze.
Black-capped chickadees appeared and accepted food from my fingers. A
chipmunk flitted and flowed along the opposite bank, then crossed the stream by way
of a tree branch to feed from my hand. Even at the peak of summer's bounty, peanut
butter seems irresistible to many forest creatures.
I shared my last bit of sandwich with the animals, then cooled myself in the
brook and lay against the steep grassy slope to dry myself in the sun. A blue heron
descended through a gap in the canopy, waggling its great wings to avoid branches.
The bird alighted and began stalking frogs and crayfish in the stream. I watched the
heron for a while, then retrieved the mare and continued riding along the brook,
which I suspected, rightly, would lead us back to the farm.

MacDougall decided to shell out some cash and have the last crop of hay baled. That
baling machine saved us a lot of hard work. It consumed windrows of hay like a
monstrous animal that excreted blocky pellets as it grazed. The next-door neighbors
Bruce and Dubois helped us get the hay into the MacDougall barn. Each bale of hay
weighed 65 pounds. MacDougall and Dubois together would stab a bale with their
pitchforks and lift it up to me in the loft, where I grabbed the bales with hooks and
stacked them. Bruce was so strong that he could stab a bale with an extra-long
pitchfork and lift it all the way up to me. By the time we finished, my forearms were
raw and bleeding.

In August I became friendly with the Bruce family, who owned the farm adjoining
MacDougall's on the other side from the Dubois farm. They had a college-age

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daughter named Sally, pie-faced but lavish of body. I wasn’t attracted to Sally, but
became totally smitten with Estelle, her college chum who came to visit for the last
two weeks of the summer break. Estelle was petite, dark, and lovely. I was painfully
shy and barely seventeen, and she a worldly college woman, but she encouraged my
adoration. I was so tongue-tied I could scarcely ask for seconds at supper, and I was
invited to supper a lot. One evening we all played hide-and-seek, and it was chilly so I
lent Estelle my shirt and when I found her hiding in the barn she felt my muscles and
let me kiss her and touch her through my shirt and next morning I saw her driven off
by her fiance. But that's another story, and this ain't the place fer it.
So much for farming. I reverted to liberal arts, studied electronic engineering
and engineering management in college, founded an advertising agency, and later
became a writer of books and articles. Go figure.

-- THE END –

http://oddsbodkins.posterous.com

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