Neighbors

          The nearest neighbors were the Joseph Karbans who lived just over the boundary line between the two farms. A woven wire fence north of our grove separated their grove of trees from our’s. Instead of a gate in the fence there was a stile – two steps on either side of the fence. What an ideal way to cross a fence! It was also a perfect place to sit, deep in the shade on a hot day.

          Mrs Karban was one of the first callers at the Uglems. They were from the “Old Country” too, but their homestead was Bohemia. They had lived among English speaking people so she was very disappointed to discover that her nearest neighbor couldn’t even understand English. She didn’t give up, but was a regular caller, she told ma “We can’t live this close together and not be able to visit. You must learn to speak English.” She got the boys interested too and they also began talking more at home in the new language. She came over often and it wasn’t long before mama could understand, and talk with her.

          Their oldest daughter Mary gave music lessons to Sylvia and she in turn helped Annie, Esther and me. Calmer also took lessons for a while. Benta and Tena didn’t learn to play the “pump organ” – I don’t know why and Mabel didn’t need lessons. She played better than any of us by ear.

          Also in the Karban family there was Tillie. After graduating from the eighth grade she went to De Smet to take Teacher’s Examination and some how she passed, but Poor Tillie! She came to our place almost every night that fall when she started teaching to get help with arithmetic. She taught only the one year.

          Then there was Lizzie, who liked the housework and kept the house so sparkling clean it was a joy to go there and visit. She and her mother baked such delicious breads, a jam filled roll called Kolache and poppy seed rolls were their favorites.

          Stella was the artist – did beautiful landscapes in oil, went to High school, changed her name to Estelle, went to Iowa to business college and didn’t come home much after that.

    Steven was the youngest, was so spoiled, petted and pampered by his sisters and parents he was quite a brat. He practiced auctioneering and got very good at it. Was called on to cry some farm auctions and we never had a basket social at the school house but what Steven sold the baskets. He was such a great entertainer I’m sure he drew the crowds. He and Julius were good buddies as they were growing up.

    Mary was married and moved away, then died leaving a lovely curly haired blue eyed blonde girl named Margaret. The father brought her to the grandparents and she was such a favorite of mine, too, I used to run over to Karbans any time of the day just to see her. She was about three years old when her father married again and took our dear Margaret away. It broke her grandma’s heart, she took to her bed and died of a stroke.

          When we left the farm in 1920, Lizzie and her husband George Coulson and son Malden were the owners of the Karban place. Steven married my seventh grade teacher’s sister Angie Morgan and lived near Lake Preston, Tillie was married and lived on a neighboring farm. Mr Karban didn’t live long after his wife died.

          The John Nelsons lived a half mile north of the school house, at the end of the long Evergreen grove. Their children were our school mates. Anne Mae and Ellen were big girls in the eighth grade when I started school but there were Nora, Lewis, Evelyn, Marie and Morris in school in the lower grades with Mabel, Esther, and me. Evelyn and I were in the first grade together so shared a double desk. I think we were naughty girls, doing a lot of whispering and giggling because I’ve had to stand in the corner many times and one day I was even sent out of the room to sit by myself in the entry. Lewis was a rascal, always stirring up trouble with the teacher but the day I fell on the schoolground and broke my collar bone he walked with me to see that I got home all right. The folks took me to the doctor and I had to keep my arm in a tight sling for a long time. The hardest thing to bear was missing school. That was even worse than the pain. Evelyn was a natural born clown and entertained us at noon with her antics and imitations. She fell behind in her grades so didn’t graduate when I did but we remained the best of friends thru grade school.

          For a part of one school year, a family named Brown moved in our neighborhood. They had several children too and a filthier raggedier bunch of kids we had never seen before. One girl was in my grade so we shared a desk, as did an older girl and Mabel. They spread lice through the whole school but I think Mabel and I were the first. I well recall the day the bugs were discovered when our hair was being combed. We stayed home that day – getting our heads washed with kerosene and strong soap. After that the Brown children were shunned by the whole school and they moved away soon after. I remember the day the children brought a gallon pail half full of sorghum (home made) to school by mistake. We all carried our lunches in such pails and since it was before the days of plastic bags and wax paper our sandwiches had a tinny taste by noon and if there was lunch left by the last recess it was practically inedible. Anyway, the day the Brown pupils brought sorghum we showed the cruelty of children by not feeling any compassion for them. They perhaps came to school without eating any breakfast, also. Their father peddled the homemade sorghum in gallon pails. I’m sure it wasn’t very clean. My dad bought some to help them out. I don’t know what he did with it. Maybe he mixed it with ground feed and fed it to the pigs.

          As I write of school event, I recall Russell Pitcock. He lived east across a slough. After an early spring thaw (Maybe January) that road became impassable so he missed some days of school. After a freeze up, which always seemed to occur we had a wonderful skating pond. Some of the older boys and girls were good skaters and enjoyed racing. In places the ice was so clear we could see tadpoles swimming in the bottom. Russell’s mother was an elite woman – set herself apart from the rest of the neighborhood so we never knew her well – but I remember that at our school picnics that were always held among the evergreens she always brought a sumptuous three layer marble cake that was the first cake to be devoured by the picnickers.

          Another family we knew only in school was the Wilde family who lived one and a half miles west of the school. There were Grace, Eugene, Kenneth and Maxine in that family. Compared to our lunches, they carried a banquet to school every day. We had sandwiches and sauce usually, sometimes cookies, but we always came home to a good nourishing meal in the evening.

          The Wildes had fruit, usually bananas, boxes of animal crackers or other bakery cookies thick with frosting, hard boiled eggs besides their sandwiches. But they were so wasteful. If they didn’t want the whole banana at noon they threw the rest away. They peeled their eggs, ate only the yokes and the whites were discarded. If there was an orange in their pail and they didn’t want it that too was tossed around like a ball.

          Such waste seemed sinful to the rest of us who were taught to be frugal and saving. Maybe they knew this and threw food away just to tease us.

          I will be writing more later of our happy days in the Evergreen School in Baker township but will try to remember I have told of the day the Brown children carried sorghum to school and they went home hungry. Selfish as we all were, no one in the school shared their lunch, I think now it should have been the duty of the teacher to set an example by dividing her lunch and asking the students to do the same.

          My favorite neighbors were Roy and Ora Lee Rich, a young couple who moved in a half mile south of our place. Maybe Roy had lived there as a bachelor, I don’t know, but he was ten years older than “Lee” and I don’t remember them until she came. What made her extra special to me was that we had the same birth date, altho’ she was twenty years older than I was.

          They lived in a two room yellow house in the woods on the north side of the road that led to the Larson and Novak farms. It seemed strange to us that the house was north of the road and the barn was on the south side. This seemed to be very inconvenient to us. Imagine carrying full milk pails across a road! Not that traffic was a problem. Maybe a buggy or wagon once or twice a day. It just seemed to me that a road was supposed to be a dividing line and it shouldn’t be between a house and a barn!

          Their first baby was a girl they named Frances and how happy we were when Ma gave us permission to go and see her. Lee was such a good friend to the older girls in our family and Ma, too, we got to see them often. When Frances started school she had to walk, of course – and was so afraid of the deep grove west of the road. Mabel, Esther and I used to wait for her at our mail box and when she saw us she ran to meet us and walked the next half mile with us. I think I was about six years older than she was.

          Then they had Porter Lee, a happy little baby, more fun yet to go to visit at the Riches. Lee always fixed us a lunch and really treated us like company. Porter was on the battleship Arizona when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec 7, 1941 and went down with the ship. His body was never recovered.

          Their third child was Fern. We didn’t see so much of her as a baby as by that time we were in High School. She died of a brain tumor while a Senior in High School.

          I last visited Lee in 1965 at her home in Lake Preston. Her youngest son Teddy lived on the farm, and by this time, or several years before we ourselves moved into town in 1920 Roy had built a square two story house, the architectural style of that day on the south side of the road. Now the house and barn were on the same side.

          When I visited Lee that day in 1965 she was slightly senile but she remembered me and we had a good visit. She couldn’t be left alone so a niece lived with her and not long after she was moved to Kingsbury Manor, the nursing home in Lake Preston. She was in her 80’s when she died. Her daughter Frances lived in California at that time and didn’t get home very often. Teddy and his wife were her family and her sister Lillian Hendrickson also lived in town.