Tie a yellow ribbon

In Oregon we lived on an eighty-acre farm that had cows, pastures, hay fields, corn fields, rows of sugar beets, watermelon and cantaloupe patches, and such. I don't know how much profit, if any, Dad ever made from the farm, since his main job was work­ing for the railroad. We were always pretty poor. Looking back on it, I think he was really raising his eight sons more than he was raising crops.

When I was small we had a couple of draft horses that were used to pull the farm equipment. Later, probably about the time I was starting school, we bought a tractor—an orange, three-wheeled Min­neapolis Moline. I was still little enough not to be of much help with a lot of things—like lifting bales of hay onto a wagon—so I got to drive the tractor sometimes.

There was always plenty of work to do on a farm. We had dairy cows, and you can never take a vaca­tion from milking them every morn­ing and every night.

Once we went to a family reunion at Lava Hot Springs in southeastern Idaho, clear across the state from where we lived. Jerry stayed home to milk the cows. Unlike my brothers who milked regularly and knew the cows by their names, Jerry wasn't used to the job and couldn't keep them straight or remember which ones had been milked and which ones hadn't. When we came home, we found he had tied a different color of cloth on each cow's tail and kept track of the cows by their colors.