On the Moraine, Part XXVIII

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

(Continued from last week.)

Fall turned into late fall in 1963. I always marked fall as when we started continuously keeping fires in the stoves. That was usually by mid-September.

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.

Dad came home for the weekend that night, and, of course, the Kennedy assassination was the topic of the weekend. Even on Sunday at church, by now we were members of the United Methodist Church in Marshall, this was the topic.  

When we got home from church, Mother decided to turn the radio on to see if there was any new news.  

Dad, John and I were outside. It was a bright fall Sunday. Mother came running out to tell us that someone had just shot Lee Harvey Oswald. The Kennedy assassination was not far from the top topic of discussion the rest of the fall.

We had our first Christmas on the farm. It was sparse. 

As we went into the new year, we were expecting baby pigs soon. We had the sows tagged and a list of due dates. We would put them in the farrowing house, former chicken house, as they became due. This was in January and February 1964.

My job was to check the sows for milk before I went to bed. If they were showing milk, Mother was to get me up about 1 a.m., to check on them. If they were having piglets, I would wipe them off and make sure they got under the heat lights. Of course, I would build a fire in the stove and keep it going the rest of the night. Bonus for me was I didn’t have to go to school the next day.

This was the routine if Dad was at work in Troy. If he was home, I didn’t have to do it – he did.

In early February, it had been very cold for several days. I had the three latest sows in the farrowing crates ready to go. I checked them all for milk, and as I remember, they were not showing any. That might have been my wish, not reality.

You guessed it. I did not get up that night. In the morning, I went out to feed them and I had three dead litters of piglets – 39 in all. I went running into the house to tell Mother about the disaster. She was upset of course, and said we had to bury them.  

The ground was frozen a couple of feet deep. We eventually fashioned something of a hole with a grubbing hoe and a pickaxe. We put the dead piglets in it and put rocks on top of it. I went to school.

Dad came home that evening. I had already beaten myself up badly over this incident. My Dad never beat me – for anything, ever. This time he was empathetic to my attitude and let me off with no remarks or punishment of any kind.

It was a huge loss to our farming enterprise, but we moved on. Perhaps Dad decided that was too much responsibility for a 13-year-old boy. He never said.  

But it is a lesson I have kept with me the rest of my life.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.