From Where I Sit

By Pat Spilseth, Columnist

This column is on the importance of neighbors and  who touched others to recall memories. Enjoy this story from my husband, Dave.

Memorial Day 1961, I was 15 and my brother Don was 9. We lived on a dairy farm 4-1/2 miles south of the little berg of Kensington, population about 300. Memorial Day for me was great, not just because we honored those who gave up their lives for our country, but mostly because school was out! We were looking at three months of glorious Minnesota summer, free from the grind of early morning wake ups and long boring classroom hours. I looked forward to Legion and town team baseball, swimming at Red Rock Lake and roller skating every Tuesday at the town hall. Of course, there was farm work which I really didn’t mind. I especially liked haying because my older cousins, George and Paul, always came to help and I loved being with them.

It was just a gorgeous day, probably about 60 degrees with not a cloud in the sky and almost no wind. Our family always attended a Memorial Day service which was an ecumenical service which included the catholics, covenants and lutherans and was held in the public school gym. We were having a nice lunch which followed the service when our uncle, Palmer Spilseth, came running in and shouted “Maynard, your barn is on fire!!!” In a full state of panic my Dad, Don and myself scrambled into our pink ’57 Plymouth and drove at mach one towards our farm. What a horrible feeling we had when we were still four miles from home and saw this giant cloud of smoke towering above our farm. 

A fire is never good, but luck and God were with us that day. My mom stayed home from the Memorial service as she was not feeling well. She was having a sandwich when she heard this crackling noise. She looked out the window and to her horror she saw the whole south end of the barn in flames. The real miracle was that a former cattle trucker just happened to be driving by on a road that is never very busy. Also, it is lucky that our barn was very visible from the road. This “Good Samaritan” who, with his family, went racing into our driveway and heard Mom shout “can you help get the cows out of the barn?” This cattle man knew exactly what to do. He, with the help of his wife and kids, unlatched the doors and bravely unhooked the stanchions of all 24 cows and quickly herded them out. What a miracle! My mom was a wonderful housewife but she had little experience working with animals and would not have been able to get those cows out on her own. What are the odds of not only having a car going by, but that the driver was a cattle man who knew exactly what to do. The truth is, that the cows were a lot more valuable than the barn. What a godsend that the cows were saved!

Sadly, our barn was burned to a crisp. And now there is another serious problem. It is late afternoon and the cows would need milking soon. If cows are not milked every 12 hour period they will develop mastitis which we referred to as stringy milk. This is a very serious disease to the point where the cows could die. We had 24 cows that needed milking and doing it by hand outside was out of the question. What to do???

Some of small town life can be a little tedious with gossip and jealousy, but when the chips are down our neighbors really came through. Luckily we had a machine shed that was large enough to accommodate 24 cows once we moved the machinery out. It was modest with a dirt floor and no running water or electricity. Don and I have racked our brains trying to remember how we ever found and installed the milkers and stanchions. Someone must have helped because we milked that night close to schedule. To run the milk machines we hooked a garden hose from the milker to our International Harvester 460 tractor vacuum pitcock, which amazingly worked pretty well.

So we converted our machine shed into a milking barn, but that was only a temporary solution. After much contemplation and consultation, Dad decided to focus on dairy by building a barn almost twice the size of the old one and eliminating our pigs and chickens. This came as great relief to Don and myself as we absolutely hated cleaning eggs every night. 

We hired the Hobella brothers, who dad affectionally called the Finlanders, to build our new barn. The project was proceeding well. We were ready to begin the shingling process. We had a huge surprise when about two dozen of our neighbors showed up ready to put on the shingles. We thought nothing of the danger at the time, but looking back this could have been a disaster. OSHA did not exist then, but if it had they would have had an absolute “cow” (pun intended). The bottom part of the roof was very steep. All we had to stand on was the 1-1/2” width of a 2×6 nailed to the roof while shingling. Amazingly these “good neighbors” shingled the entire massive roof in one day without any incidents.

My mother was gone as she was visiting her mother in Duluth but sister, Jan, was home from college. Dad told her at about 10 a.m. that she was going to have two dozen men for lunch. Jan panicked!  Luckily Aunt Selma came to the rescue, and together they calmly helped prepare a very nice lunch. 

The Alexandria Park Region Echo newspaper sent out a reporter who wrote a nice article including a picture about neighbors helping neighbors. Senator Hubert Humphrey picked up on the article and sent us a wonderful letter stating that this is what makes America a great country. Neighbors helping neighbors.

What seemed like a disaster that Memorial Day turned out to be a very good thing with the help of great friends, neighbors and one very “good samaritan.”

~Dave Spilseth, with enormous input from brother, Don, who remembered a lot more of the details than I did even though he was only nine years old in the summer of ’61.

* * * * * * * *

To contact Pat, email: pat.spilseth@gmail.com.