Memories of Dad

So many things bring back memories of Dad--like the old corn husking peg that Dad always used. Its shiny metal is dim and a little rusty around the edges, while the narrow leather strap has dried stiff from lying around on a shelf for the past 70 some years. Dad preferred it to hook that many farmers used during the depression years to shuck mature corn. That was before modern corn pickers were used. He taught all four of his girls and his four boys how to use it properly. The peg brings to mind the acres and acres of corn Charles Lorenzo Martin grew and husked each of the almost thirty years he farmed, from the time he married Cora Joy in 1915 until he retired in August 1944.

‘Ren’ as Mom and the neighbors called him, ground the corn to feed the cattle, hogs, and sheep that he raised and the chickens that Mom raised. The wheat was stored in gunny sacks. When the family needed cracked-wheat for breakfast cereal, Ren would throw a gunny sack of wheat between the front fender and the hood of his Chevy and take it to be ground at Souden’s Mill in Emporia. Dad also kept a team of horses that meant a lot to him. Dad developed a close relationship with his team, as they spent many hours together every day in the fields, either working the ground, planting cultivating or harvesting the crops of corn, wheat and milo.

This Greenwood County farmer was a ‘jack of all trades’ and the master of most of them. The four older daughters remember how Dad built their home in 1922 the year Ralph, their first brother, was born. Ren dug a half basement, then built a three-bedroom house over it. He added a large attic room, a large screened back porch and made a small room for the indoor bathroom opening off the kitchen. But the well never provided enough water for Mom’s dream bathroom to happen. My husband, Clyde, still has the wooden, folding extension ruler Ren used for measuring boards. Ren also built a barn, a brooder house, a large chicken house and other outbuildings as needed.

Ask any of the eight children, and they will tell how Dad and his brother, Lloyd became woodcutters to keep the home fires burning bright. They cut timber along Willow Creek, hauling the enormous logs six or seven miles home with Ren’s team and wagon. There the logs were guided through a buzz saw to become large chunks for the boys to split for Mom’s wood box.

The constant need of keeping his farm equipment in good working conditions turned Dad into a better-than-average blacksmith, and to keep the farm horses shod regularly he mastered the skills of a farrier. Clyde even remembers some of the horses, “There was Ol’ Barney; the mare, Kate, that once kicked out the side of the barn; Frank, who had such big feet he scared everyone but Dad, and Polly the kid’s pony.”

Ren did custom threshing and haying for others in a ten-mile area of his home. He needed to earn extra money to buy what was needed for his large family. Ren, like so many of his neighbors, had to recover from a terrible financial loss he suffered from the forced sale of his cattle during the “stock market crash” in 1929. The only thing Dad attempted to do that didn’t pan out was the raising of Angora rabbits. Shearing the rabbits was a difficult job but in the end the rabbit meat turned out to be real tasty.

When Ren’s father, John T. Martin, came from Illinois to Greenwood County, Kansas in 1867, he was one of the first generations of Martins to go to Prairie Belle’s one-room school. Ren and his three brothers and sister were the second generation. When the first of Ren’s children started to school at Prairie Belle, they made the third generation. Ren was elected to the school board in 1921 and was re-elected continuously until he retired from farming and moved to Madison in 1944. Two of the eight children married and lived in the neighborhood and sent their children, the fourth generation, to Prairie Belle school.

The Martin girls and their four younger brothers recall the excitement of butchering days on the farm. Howard still smiles as he recalls the hours he spent watching Dad ‘stoning’ his knives in preparation for the big event. “Dad would choose the first real cold spell of winter to butcher five or six fat hogs for the winter supply of pork.“ Clyde remembers his uncles and their families coming to help. The women and girls cooked the meals for everybody while the boys gather around underfoot at the butchering site and ran errands.

The next few days were equally busy as the chilled hogs were cut up for hams, shoulders for roasts, and side meat for bacon. The fat was rendered for lard and poured into large stone crocks. Then they ground up all the extra scrap meat for sausage. Dad made his own curing mixture of salt and spices and packed the meat into wooden barrels for several weeks of curing. Dad’s recipe was known to excellent, which is probably why someone sneaked into the cellar right under Mon and Dad’s bedroom window one night and walked out with several hams. That incident was the reason Dad rigged his own burglar alarm. It would not only wake him but the entire family and probably would have given the would-be thief a heart attack.

Dad loved to read through the long winter evening, using the old kerosene lamp that we still cherish. Rural electricity didn’t arrive in the Prairie Belle school area until the late 1940s. We have one of his well-worn books, “The Price of the Prairie,” a story of Kansas by Margaret Hill McCarter. This book was enjoyed by the whole family so much down through the years, that we have collected almost every book written by this author.

When Dad retired from the farm and moved into the Madison, he took a job at the local Farmer Union grocery store. There he put his meat-cutting skills to use again. In 1949 Ren attended a grocery store supervisor school in Kansas City. This prepared him for the next step in his vision of a career in meat-cutting. In December of that year he purchased a small-town grocery store in Reading, Kansas. This part of dad’s life is remembered by his numerous grandchildren as they recall Granddad as their own ‘candy man,’ because he was always good for a handful of suckers or a sack of candy to be shared on the way home from family visits. For everybody else the Martin Grocery Store had the best cuts of meat for miles around. In 1954 Dad retired a second time when his youngest son, Charles entered high school. For a better education than the small town of Reading could provide, Ren moved once again. This time to Emporia where Dad’s large family remembers attending fun filled reunions at Peter Pan Park.

Story ID:	512
Written by:	Gail Lee Martin (bio, contact, other stories)
Organization:	Kansas Authors Club
Story type:	Family History
Location:	Greenwood County Kansas USA
Year:	1930
Person:	Charles Lorenzo Martin