Remember . . .
by  Kenneth S. Moore

In the February/March 2008 edition of FARM & RANCH LIVING magazine, Kenneth S. Moore from Tigard, Oregon remembered when snow settled on their bedding. “I was born on a farm north of Benkelman, Nebraska, the fifth of seven children. My parents were Carl and Myrtle Moore. I started going to a one-room school on my fifth birthday, September 5, 1927. I did well in my studies, but had a tough time on the playground because I was a year younger than all my classmates.

In 1930, we moved to a farm near Haigler, Nebraska. The old farmhouse hadn’t been lived in for quite a while and was in poor shape. Two weeks after moving in, we had a 3-day blizzard—each morning, we woke up with snow that had come through the cracks and covered the bed. My dad and older brother ran a line from the house to the barn so they would not get lost going out to milk the cows and tend the stock. Unfortunately, we lost most of our pigs.  I have some photographs from when I went to school in the Haigler area. One shows our 2-horsepower school bus. I’m the tallest kid, second from the right. My brother Willard is at the back of the bus on the far left. The other four (three boys and a girl) were neighbors.

I did most of the driving. We had a good barn and some hay at school where the horses rested and refueled themselves. More than once, that team got us home in a dust strom so bad the chickens went to roost by 3 p.m.

Another photo, taken in the spring of 1933, shows my schoolmates and me. I am on the left wearing a pair of overalls my folks bought me new the previous fall. One pair overalls had to last the whole school year. It looks from the knee patches that I may have been playing too many marbles.  

 I do not remember the names of everyone in the picture, and would love to hear from anyone who went to that school between 1930 and 1935. When my wife and I passed through there in 1963 or ’64, I called our old teacher. Her name was Gladys Jennings until she married the chairman of the school board, a local farmer named Bill Mahon.

I told her how much her teaching meant to me, and she was glad to hear I turned out so well and had a happy home.

-- Transcribed by T. W. Douglass

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