10. The Barn

After our father died, Mom moved my two brothers and me back to the farm in northern Ohio where her aging parents still lived. Her three farmer brothers were nearby. She rightly thought it would be a good place to raise her sons while she (dutifully) cared for her aging parents. (Mom was a registered nurse.)

My grandparents’ old farmhouse, originally built without indoor plumbing, and in which my mother was born, was at the junction of US Route 20 and Luckey (Yes, it is spelled with an “e”.) Road. Their small farm spread out to the south and east. There were, as was typical of mid-western farms of that time, a number of surrounding structures: a milk house, the garage that housed a Chrysler sedan grandma, (a pusher of candy corn), referred to as, “the machine”,*** a workshop complete with forge (farmers were self-reliant), a corn crib/storage shed and, about 75 yards south of the house, a large barn. Barns are wonderful structures. This one was particularly large and handsome.

That barn was a major part of growing up for my brothers and me. From the north (house) side of the barn a sliding door hanging from rollers on an overhead track, opened into what might best be called a cement-floored, tack room, half of it a step lower than the entrance level. A rack (on which equipment hung) separated the 2 levels. (If you looked closely you could see that the dividing “rack” was in fact stanchions that formerly held cows as they were milked.) We used the space largely to store grain supplements for livestock as well as equipment such as shovels and pitchforks. Below that “foyer” we stepped down two steps to a still cement-floored area (an extension to the original barn) where we usually kept pigs, including occasionally 350 pound sows with their “litters” of 10 to 12 piglets. Beyond that, through another roiling door, was a connecting space that once housed chickens and beyond that a seldom used low, flat-roofed pig shed. Farther to the east was a fenced-in pasture.

There would inevitably come a time, usually when the piglets had grown to 20 to 30 pounds, when we would herd the young males (not an easy task) up into the tack room where I would help my uncles confine them in a small space, grab them one by one, and castrate them. I remember my nausea as a young adolescent male the first time I witnessed this procedure. (I slid away to the other side of the barn to vomit.)

In any event, also on that lower level there was a large cement water tank (I would guess about 6’ by 3’ and 3 feet high). My grandfather, who was both an inventor and entrepreneur, designed it so that it was automatically filled, originally by windmill, later by an electric pump. A toilet-like float regulated the water level. At one end of the tank a bent pipe, serving as a siphon, delivered the water to two built-up bowls at floor level where the livestock could drink. On top of the tank there were wooden planks to keep out dust, feathers and other barn detritus.

In the winter a heat lamp hung over the syphon keeping it from freezing. But the water in the tank would freeze over and (if left unattended), eventually disrupt the syphon that was not easily re-established. Consequently, in cold weather once or twice a day my brothers or I would use an axe to cut through the 2–4 inch thick ice on the tank. We would chop through the ice last thing, before we went to bed and then again early in the morning. This was a cold, unpleasant job, made no better by the spooky dark barn.****

Walking into this cement-floored section of the barn the first thing you might notice was its thinly whitewashed, walls, windows, and straw-lined loft (where “selfish” chickens occasionally hid their eggs). In fact, the thin white film was not whitewash, but rather dried DDT — the miracle cure-all of the fifties. Above this cement-floored section of the barn ran a track on which a bathtub-sized “bucket” (raised and lowered with chains and ratchets) could be filled with manure, lifted up and sent out through a window-sized opening to a waiting (steaming) manure pile.

Approaching the front of the barn, (from the west) there was a pair of large sliding doors at the top of the “barn bridge” that brought equipment (trucks, wagons, tractors, etc.) up to the raised floor level. Lower and to the right was another sliding door through which manure could be loaded by a tractor and scoop into a manure spreader for dispersal on our fields of corn, wheat, oats or soy beans.

(Did you know that if you take a handful of freshly harvested wheat, put it in your mouth and chew, it becomes a perfectly serviceable gum? I thought not!) But I digress.

Inside the main barn doors, to the left of the barn floor were granaries. Ahead and far enough overhead for large trucks to pull under, was one of my grandfather’s proudest contraptions: a huge bin for storing grain, usually wheat, oats or corn.

I would estimate that the bin was approximately 20x20x20. That’s a lot of grain. Grandpa had a conveyer belt with cups attached, built into the floor that would carry the grain aloft. We would just have to shovel the grain over a hole in the floor where the conveyer belt would pick it up and carry it aloft. When the time came to take the stored grain to market (presumably now commanding a higher price) a simple chute unloaded the grain into trucks waiting below.

To the right of the barn floor was another sliding door that opened into the dirt-floored livestock area — about four feet below. A large, probably three feet wide, manger jutted out into the livestock area connecting in a “T” with another large manger that ran to the right and left. Most of the time we would be feeding sheep, sometimes cattle in this area. We would walk through the mangers spreading grain and baled hay. If memory serves, we put down fresh (straw) bedding once a week.

[In retrospect I think the responsibility of having 150 sheep or 50 cattle depending on you played a large part in the future dependability of my brothers and me.]

But, for us the glory of this grand, already old, barn was (literally) above all this. About eight or nine feet above the barn floor, reachable by ladder, were haymows on each side. A single mow to the left and a doublewide mow to the right. Of course, their purpose was to store straw and hay — originally loose, later baled. In fact, we could store all the hay/straw we needed in the single mow and in the front half of the double mow — which left the back mow for the basketball court about which I will write presently.

As kids this was a wonderful playground. We built multi-leveled tunnels and “secret” chambers out of straw bales; had wars with peashooters and slingshots. But most of all, we would put on shows in our very own “Big Top”.

Some context: our mother had grown up on this farm, had left it to go to nursing school, then to be an airline stewardess and a Powers model in New York. Her first husband was a basketball coach whom she lost to an infection after less than a year of marriage; her second, my dad, died at age 41 leaving her three sons to raise — the youngest of whom was only three weeks old. She gave up the friends and society of a Boston suburb to return to the farm and to provide a life for us kids. In short, she was (unreasonably) fond of us and invested in our success.

So, imagine the following scene: way up at the top, along the ridgeline of the barn, ran a track originally used for hoisting hay. In the old days loose hay would be lifted up in a sling, by horses; then towed horizontally by rope to the best spot and dropped (by trip-line) into the filling haymow. Then it would be forked by hand, (I have done this hot, sweaty work.), into corners and remote spaces as the mow filled. By this time, however, we would back a wagon of bales into the barn, drop them one by one onto a conveyer, and spill them aloft to be stacked. But I digress (again).

My (wandering) point is that way aloft (probably 40–50 feet above the barn floor) was a track from which hung the long, probably forty or fifty year-old ropes, that once lifted slings of hay. Holding a rope in one hand, with visions of Batman in our heads, we would climb to the top of a stack of bales and swing across the mow to another stack. No great danger there. We were rarely more than ten feet above the bales, which would catch us when (not if) we fell.

When that proved to be insufficient excitement we took to swinging from haymow to haymow, (i.e. across the wooden barn floor below), sometimes simultaneously in opposite directions. “Look Ma, one hand!” You get the idea. I was then probably 12 or 13; brother John was 9 or 10. (At this point Roger was still too young for a staring role — though we found other ways to put him at risk.)

I am embarrassed to say that after rehearsing and perfecting our circus routine, after agreeing on the order of death-defying tricks, we would run to the house and get Mom to come out to watch the show AND WE WOULD CHARGE ADMISSION!!

The barn was a place to grow, to explore, to earn some money (not just from Mom), to confront and overcome fears — and a place to play basketball.

***Between the milk house and the garage, both close by the road for obvious reasons, was 2.5” diameter pipe that rose from the ground about three feet, turned 90 degrees, ran about five or six feet and turned back into the ground. It was a hitching rail that once welcomed horses and carriages but that now supported grandkids as they swung by their knees and did other acrobatic feats.

**** A single bare bulb, even 100 or 150 watts, has little purchase against the dark of a cavernous bar. I would proceed tentatively from island of light to distant light switch, to new island of light, to…

Part Two: Basketball.

I have just read a news release about two basketball stories at San Diego State. The first trumpets the fact that for the past four years San Diego State basketball has outdrawn all basketball programs in California, including UCLA; the second announces construction of a new basketball training facility.

When I shared the news release with brother John, he responded,

“Gee, I thought your current facilities were very impressive. There were no missing floorboards. The lighting exceeded 200 watts. You could run under the backboard without getting a nail in your side.

I still miss the old hay mow basketball. If you could play in an environment where it was 30 degrees, you could play anywhere.”

To provide some context for John’s response it is necessary to journey back in time.

It is hard to imagine the basketball mania of the mid-west (Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois) in the 50’s. The movie, “Hoosiers”, (set in 1954 rural Indiana) captures it well: the local pride, the scrawny, not-all-that-tall athletes who played their hearts out, cheerleaders in below-the-knee, pleated skirts and letter sweaters, caravans of fans driving on back roads, past harvested cornfields dusted with snow.

We (I speak as a fan, not a player) were the Troy Luckey Trojans.

Our coach was “Frenchy” Fellier, who doubled as a biology teacher. And we were good — often regional contenders for the (Class “C”) title.

Our rural, consolidated high school of @300 was in Luckey Ohio, a village of perhaps a 1,500, five or six miles south of our house which was, in turn, about ten miles south of Toledo.

Before I had my driver’s license I could not go to most of the games — perhaps only three or four a year, bumming “pity” rides from older kids. I would listen to the games huddled over our big old console radio that received as much static as signal. I suspect the radio broadcasts from those small gyms were only 25–50 watts.

Exciting as these high school games were, they were far away and remote, played by celebrities from a completely different social class. For us the real “home court “ was not in Luckey, Ohio, but in our barn.

The inner haymow, running the full length of the south wall of the barn was our basketball court. The front and back walls of the barn formed its ends. The North wall of the court, varying in height from 8 to 12 feet depending on the time of year (and how far we had drawn down our supply in caring for the livestock), was formed from stacked straw or hay bales. The “court” was open to the roof, higher above than any of us could throw a basketball. In retrospect I imagine the court was about 60 feet long (a regulation basketball court is 94 feet) and perhaps 20 to 25 feet wide (half the regulation ­­­50 feet).

Mom had someone build us two oversized white backboards, about 5 x 8 from which our (usually netted) hoops stood forth, ten feet above the floor at each end. Around the perimeter of the court we had bare light bulbs, (perhaps 150 to 200 watts each) typically two at each end, roughly to the right and left of where the foul line would be.

[To paraphrase Blazing Saddles, ”We don’t need no stinking foul line.”] The light was not good in that cavernous space, especially on cold winter nights, (During the day some light would creep in through cracks in the barn wall.), but once your eyes adjusted….

There were smells emanating from the livestock below — and welcome heat. Barns are full of birds (Sparrows, Starlings, Swallows and the occasional Barn Owl) and, of course, not dusted. Brother Roger reminds me of the powdered bird dung that filled the air as basketballs caromed off walls and beams — and that we inhaled carefree.

At the east end of the court, down by the floor was an opening (from which one could drop bales of straw to the floor below); occasionally the basketball would escape through that portal and fall into the sloppy, wet manure below. No problem: someone (usually the youngest and least senior among us) would be dispatched to retrieve the ball. A few wipes with a handful of straw and it was fine. There has been a lot of talk recently about a shortage of microbes in this generation of kids’ lives; no such problem on the farm.

I must confess that we had a bit of a home court advantage. We not only knew every angle and every shadow; we also knew where the “dead boards were”, i.e. the ones from which the basketball would only rebound halfway. (On cold winter nights the basketball was less than spry.)

Typically we played three on three, though when cousins or neighborhood kids dropped by we could do a crowded five on five.

For us basketball was not just a winter activity; it was year round, weekends, after daily chores, etc.. Sometimes we would just shoot alone, but most of the time it was a contest no matter how much we had to gerrymand it; e.g. three younger against two older; four of us civilians against two varsity guys. If there were only two of us we would often play “H-O-R-S-E”

But the best times were with cousins, especially Uncle Ernie’s two sons, Doug and John, and Uncle Herm’s two sons, Larry and Merle.

(Doug and Larry were close to my age; John and Merle were closer in age to brother John.) That was some serious basketball. Games would go on for three or four hours. We would bounce off walls (hoping that a random nail was not protruding from the spot).

One of the pleasures of my San Diego State life was occasionally dropping by an SDSU basketball practice to watch (the master) Steve Fisher developing his young men. For a basketball wannabe like myself it was a pure delight.

Occasionally Coach Fisher would ask if I wanted to say a few words to the team. But of course. He would blow the whistle and we would immediately be surrounded by a forest of young men (so big that I had to consciously remind myself they were only 18 or 20 years old). One afternoon, in trying to convey my love of their sport and my admiration for their talent/effort I began my comments by asking, “How many of you know what a haymow is?”

Silence.

Nowadays, real basketball is not played so much in barns as on urban playgrounds.

My brothers and I have fond memories of that barn: the work, the play, the camaraderie — just as Steve Fisher’s young men will have fond memories of SDSU basketball: the work, the play, the camaraderie.

Basketball is a great game — in part because it can be played almost anywhere: urban playground or Ohio barn. I know today’s urban kids could wipe the floor with my rural basketball players of the 50’s.

But our microbes could take their microbes any day!