One day in November, John and I were both home sick with colds. We were listening to “Everybody’s Farm” on WLW radio. NBC broke into the program to tell us President Kennedy had been shot. It was Nov. 23, 1963. We spent the rest of the day listening to the radio.
Here we go again…Rasmussen is out with a survey whose results says 53% of likely U.S. voters ages 18 to 39 would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election. Really?
The Highland County Fair, 1963: The balance of the summer of 1963 went by in a bucolic manner. The weather was unremarkable for summertime. My 4-H pig, Julius Caesar, grew nicely, innocently unaware of this fate. I treated him like a pet and mentally ignored the coming end.
Free time and greed, in its basest form, results in murder. Cain used a rock to kill his brother, Abel. It was cheap, just pick it up off the ground. Today, our weapons may not be so cheap, but they are designed to be impulsive.
We farmed mostly with the Case that spring, but I would run the John Deere dragging after Dad had plowed. Dragging plowed ground is a rough ride. You know what I am talking about if you have ever done it.
So, there is a lesson here for all of us. The way we see the world is not necessarily the way the majority sees the world. I am not saying we should change, but we should at least be aware of our surroundings.
It slowly became spring in 1963. Dad spent the winter – when he was home – relocating and building new fences around the homestead. As normal, he had eyes bigger than our ability to do work.
I made my first Social Security payment in March 1970. Here we are in August 2025, 665 months later, and I am still paying into Social Security because I still work. I would estimate that the return I have received on average on my “investment” has been less than 3%.
One evening, John developed a terrible cold, and Mother became very worried about him and thought is was pleurisy. We had no car, no established doctor, or anything. These things developed into a pattern – they happened when Dad was in Troy working.
I don’t like everything about President Trump. And I didn’t dislike everything about the other 13 presidents who have served in my lifetime. They all have their good and bad points.
We hadn’t lived on the Beaver Farm more than a couple of weeks when Highland County was hit with a severe cold spell. We had wood heat. And an outhouse.
The White House is starting to work on pharmaceuticals. I would like to see the speed here we have seen on tariffs and, further, I would like to see such pressure applied to hospitals, too.
The McNary Farm (164 acres) and the Beaver Farm (286 acres) put us right at 450 acres, with about half tillable. Welcome to the concept of dirt rich and cash poor.
Every crisis is doom, and we’ll never get out of it. Then there is a pronouncement that there are no solutions, learn to live with it. Then a new solution is found by bright people who have figured out a way to make money solving the problems of energy shortages.
One of my measures of the deterioration of society is the state of public restrooms. If it continues, they might as well just eliminate them and send you out behind the building as in days of old.
