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Eldon Barrett

Brandt's Cormorant
Brandt's Cormorant

Eldon Barrett, my father-in-law, died 16 December 2009, a few minutes past midnight. I had already gone to bed. My wife, Rebecca, woke me to tell me her mother had called. Her dad had died and she was going over to help her mother. For the last few years Rebecca’s parents have lived in a mobile home a hundred yards north of our old farm house on land that we lent to them. I stayed in bed, but did not return to sleep. After an hour or so, the dogs let me know that something was happening. I got up and saw the lights from the undertaker’s vehicle.

I already miss Eldon. He grew up in Olympia. He was a newspaper man all his life, but I have always thought of him as cowboy from eastern Oregon. He always had a story about riding horses and herding cattle on his uncle’s ranch near Burns. He had the down-to-earth, no nonsense, unrelenting attitude of someone with cow manure on his boots and a bunch of stubborn cows to chase.

Eldon once described himself as a “grab your hat and get the story newspaper reporter.” When he retired, he was working for the old United Press International in an office close to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer building. The UPI is gone now and the Seattle-PI is Internet-only. When he retired, both were going strong. Eldon and I talked often about the transformation from print to Internet and what it means for the news business.

Although congestive heart failure weakened him physically, especially during his last six months, Eldon was keeping up, doing most of his newspaper reading on line. Like the rest of us, he fumed about Vista on his recently purchased laptop and more than once asked me about installing Ubuntu.

Our last conversation was about James G. Swan, the Port Townsend historian, ethnologist, promoter and ne’er do well who has captured my interest lately. I asked Eldon if he knew about Lucille MacDonald’s biography of Swan. His answer was typical Eldon “Lucy? Yeah, I knew her really well. She was a good writer. Told the truth. Swan was an old drunk. Smart man though.” Then he proceeded to tell a story about an office party at the PI fifty years ago.

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Education

Neither of my grandfathers went to school past the third grade. They both read the Bellingham Herald every day, never needed help with written instructions, voted in every election, and kept themselves as well informed as the average voter in their precinct; they were both quick mental calculators with the wits to sniff the air and negotiate a favorable deal while the stakes were changing. My mother said her father could play any musical instrument he touched. He fiddled to entertain the neighbors and he read, transposed, and arranged music. But for both my grandfathers, from grade three on, their only classroom was work on the farm.

I believe my grandfather’s lack of education was a thorn in the side of my great-grandfather, Gottlieb, who was raised in East Prussia and orphaned about the age of twelve. Lucky for him, nineteenth century Prussia was busy founding European social democracy. When he and his younger brother were orphaned, the newly established Prussian social safety net snatched them up and educated them in the Prussian public school system. The pair emigrated to America with an exemplary liberal and technical education.

Life in America was a success for Gottlieb. Technically trained as a woodworker, he was quickly hired in railroad car yards building passenger cars decorated with ornate woodwork in Detroit and then Stevens Point, Wisconsin. He worked in the car yards until he accumulated the resources for his next step: he bought a farm in Minnesota and became a land-owning farmer in about 1880.

Gottlieb’s farm in Blue Earth Minnesota was ten degrees south of the 52nd parallel of Gottlieb’s birthplace in Prussia, but Blue Earth’s temperature extremes are closer to those of harsh Scandinavia or Russia than the mild northern marine climate of Prussia.

Gottlieb and his growing sons learned to farm in Minnesota, and apparently they learned well. By the 1890’s Gottlieb had collected the resources for another step. This time a move to Whatcom County, Washington Territory, a place with a wet marine climate that called itself the “fourth corner” because it was the last corner of the country to be settled. This was Gottlieb’s final move.

Gottlieb’s Minnesota decade was as harsh as the Minnesota winter. The family has never said anything good about Minnesota in 1880s.

Cold, hot, dusty, miserable. Not enough rain and too much snow. Hail recalling biblical stonings. Few schools, a dismal fact than scarcely mattered when there was too much work to allow school in the summer and too much cold for school in the winter.

My grandfather was born during the Minnesota decade in Blue Earth. He had an older and a younger brother. Older brothers had first right to education, my grandfather’s younger brother was too young to do a man’s work on the farm. If someone had to stay home to work, it was my grandfather. A third grade education was the best Gottlieb could give him. Gottlieb’s thorn was his intelligent, energetic second son who had no trade, no science, no history, no literature, no art, no philosophy, no theology; only the bare skeleton of literacy and far too advanced training in hard labor and disappointment.

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The Barn

Barns in Whatcom County, and all over the US, changed in the mid-twentieth century. In Whatcom County, the dairy industry propelled the change. In the old, pre-refrigeration, days, every farm had a few dairy cows, just enough to supply the family with fresh milk, cream, and butter. A few dairies near population centers were larger and supplied fresh milk to non-farm families, but their size and location was severely limited by the rapid handling required to prevent milk from spoiling. Butter and cheese were the only traditional ways of preserving fragile milk and they were not an effective economic connection between remote farms and city populations.

Until the forties– I’m not sure of the year– my grandparents had only three or four cows. My grandpa and and my dad sat on three legged stools and milked the cows by hand. The milk was cooled by placing a twenty gallon milk can into a tank of cool well water. The milk that the family and one or two neighbors could not consume then went to a hand-cranked, later electric, centrifugal cream separator. Cream kept long enough to sell to a dairy, and the perishable skim milk went to the hogs.

For its first fifty years, cash crops on the farm were quite diverse. Grandpa sold potatoes, eggs, sugar beets, wheat, oats, garden vegetables, beef, pork, cream, and probably other things I never heard about. Mid-century, the diversity of cash crops ended. The farm became a dairy farm with three cash crops: whole milk, eggs, and potatoes.

The economy of the family centered on the monthly milk check. Dad and Grandpa sold an occasional cull dairy cow for beef, a load of hay, straw, oats, or wheat when they had a surplus or the price was too good to pass up, but those were bumper crops and windfalls, not to be counted on to pay taxes and the electricity bill. Dad continued to raise grass, wheat, oats, and corn, but as feed for the dairy cows, not as cash sources. The eggs and potatoes were still cash crops, but these sidelines were only assurance that there would be no idle time left after dairying and raising fodder.

The transformation to a dairy farm also transformed the barn. In 1940, the barn housed a team of horses, a bull, a few cows and calves, and their hay, grain, and bedding. By 1950, the herd grew to close to thirty head, requiring specialized space for milking and more storage for hay, silage, and grain. The horses were replaced with a tractor and the adoption of artificial insemination eliminated the prison-like quarters for a sometimes violent bull.

The  war time Seattle population clamoring for refrigerated whole milk drove the change. With improved transportation and refrigeration, Whatcom County, a  hundred miles to the north, became a major milk supplier, and eventually grew to be one of the largest milk producing counties in the US. But Whatcom dairy farms first had to meet the requirements of the King County Health Department to get a Grade A license, which was the entrance ticket to the twentieth century economy for a farmer in what was called the fourth corner of the country.

Like health departments all over, King County required concrete floors, painted walls, and generally sanitary conditions in the milking barn and milk house. As time went on, they also required refrigerated storage of milk on the farm. The days of cans of well-water-cooled milk sitting on milk stands waiting for the milk truck were over. From the cow to a refrigerated storage tank to a refrigerated tank truck was the only acceptable way to handle Grade A milk.

Dad and Grandpa added a concrete floored milking wing to the barn before I was born. The milking barn had eighteen stanchions to hold cows while they were milking and was specifically constructed to meet King County Health Department regulations. The stanchions were equipped with vacuum lines to operate milking machines. They also added a concrete silo to replace the small wood stave silo that was only adequate for the small herd of the old days. The old milk house was located at the well and set up for water cooling the milk; Dad replaced it with a new milk house that was closer to the barn and contained a refrigerated milk tank.

In addition to changes to the barn, Dad appropriated every bit of spare dry space in out buildings for storing oats and wheat that he had milled for his own blend of dairy feed. The old horse barn, hog barn, even the little mother-in-law house that Grandpa built for my great grandmother were eventually requisitioned for grain storage.

This was the barn as it was while I was growing up. It continued to be used in the same way for close to fifty years until an accident forced Dad to retire.