Minnesota's Greatest Generation Oral

Lyman C. Irrgang Narrator Minnesota Historical Society March 4, 2006 This is Lyman C. Irrgang. I was born in Brighton Township, Nicollet County on the 29th of April 1923. My parents were William P. and Frances C. (Sondag) Irrgang and my grandparents were Charles M. Sondag, Angeline (Reising) Sondag, Joseph J. Irrgang, and Caroline (Giefer) Irrgang. I went to school in Granby for the first three years and then went to school in Brighton Township through eighth grade. In 1936, I went to Nicollet to start high school. During the Depression my father farmed a hundred and sixty acre farm just . where Buddy Giefer lives today and he only did that two years because in those days farmingII a hundred and sixty acres was really too much for one man because he had to do it all with horses. So you had to handle all your hay with a fork practically. And straw. I remember he’d go out four o’clock in the morning and shock grain in the fall and then he’d comeGeneration in and milkPart a couple cows and then he’d go out with horses and cut grain. I don’t know. It seemed like those winters were colder than they are nowSociety and also the clothes weren’t as good by far. I remember when we lived in Brighton Township I walked about a good three-quarters of a mile to school and so did a couple of my younger brothers. Some days I would go and they wouldn’t go because it was soProject: darned cold that winter. I remember I just had a jacket and I imagine it was lined becauseGreatest it was pretty warm. Then I had a cap that had earlaps on it. In those days we had mittens because the gloves weren’t good enough. Your fingers individually would get so cold. Historical When I think of the Depression I think of where we lived at one time. We paid eight dollars a month for a big house and every Historynight we’d go and get milk when the farmer was separating his milk after milking the cows. We’d get a gallon of milk and that would cost us a nickel. I remember working for this one farmer. He had eighty acres about a mile from the farm he ran that we lived on and on Saturdays in the fall I can remember going out in the field with him. In those daysMinnesota's they cut theOral corn and shocked it and let it dry and then they shredded the dry corn. But there was a lot lost in the field so him and I would go out with a team and a hayrack about eight o’clock in the morningMinnesota or maybe a little earlier and then we wouldn’t come in until maybe five at night. I know it was getting dark already. And the next thing he’d give me a quarter. And I was satisfied. Of course then you could buy a bottle of pop for a nickel and cigarettes were ten cents a pack. Although I didn’t smoke at the time. During summer vacations I would always go to some farmer and help him, oh, probably from the age of ten through thirteen at least. I’d be away from the folks all summer and be working for somebody. I remember when I was . I think when I was nine I worked for Bernie Dorn’s father and mother and I know I cultivated all the corn for them that year. Hauled all the manure. And I run the grain wagon during threshing. That was hauling sacks of grain from the thresher to the 13 granary and then dumping it. When there was nothing else going on I was pulling weeds in the garden or something like that. Life on the farm in the 1930s was hard work. It was all with horses and the two-row cultivator was about the biggest you had for corn. Sometimes just a single row. You put up hay out in the field. It was cut one day and then dried for a day or two and then use the hay bucker and a rake to get it near the stack and make this big stack of hay. Somebody’d be up there stacking it and tramping it down and somebody’d be pitching it up to him. It was terribly hot. No air conditioning in those days. I remember one time. It was maybe about the second year I ever run a bundle team during threshing. I come home one night with the team and put them away and I suppose it was . well, it was always between ten and midnight when we got home. I remember going upstairs to bed and I took off my shoes and I said, oh, I’m just going to lay down for a minute. I just laid back with my clothes on and I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until morning. That was, you know, five o’clock you got up. I remember I had a blue shirt on. And that thing just had streaks of . where the sweat had dried and streaks of salt. And of course I went to work with the same clothes on that day. II When I was about nine years old one winter my dad got very sick and he was bedridden. So another uncle of mine dropped a truckload of wood at ourGeneration place rightPart ahead of our house. So every night when I come home from school I had to chop enough wood to fill a big wood box because that’s what we heated with. Then I had to fill the kerosene lamps, which, of course, there was no electricity there at that time and no indoor plumbing. Then I’d haveSociety to haul in drinking water. Once a week when my mother was going to wash then I’d have to haul in many buckets of water to fill this big boiler she had on the stove to heat overnight to have hot water to wash. Project: Food. My mother always had a big garden.Greatest Clothing in those days wasn’t near as good as it is today. You didn’t have . for some reason we didn’t have hoods. I don’t know why they didn’t think of that. But we had caps with earlaps on. I remember that one winter was so terribly cold. I went to school every day but sometimes one of myHistorical brothers or sisters would not go. One time I went there and I had almost a mile to walk but I’d usually run because it was so cold and that kept me warm. But I got there thatHistory morning and nobody was there and I was planning on getting in and getting warm and then I had to run home again. When the Armistice Day blizzard was in 1940 I was working for Edmund Giefer because I had worked forMinnesota's GrommereschOral in the summertime and he only had a man in the summertime when there was a lot of work to do. One funny thing. The farmers always used to say when it rained that was a good day for hiredMinnesota men and ducks. We ll, yeah. It wasn’t so good for hired men because then they’d always say well clean out the chicken barns. So you’d have to pull up with a manure spreader and then clean out the chicken barn and throw it in a manure spreader and take it out in the field. But during the blizzard, that day started out so nice in the morning. A little windy. But it wasn’t cold or anything. All of a sudden by ten thirty or so it was blowing to beat blazes and snowing hard and we were not prepared for it. In those days you had to haul the top off the silo because the last corn that was put in there was not very good. You had to haul that off. I remember we hauled it with a manure spreader and I . you had to go against the wind and the wind was so strong the horses just didn’t want to go against the wind. I had to walk behind them and slap them on the butt with the reins just to get them to go. Then Edmund and 14 me and another hired man, Bud Larson, we had to go out and pitch hay off a haystack in that terrible wind and we could only get it as high as the rack went on the hay wagon because the wind was so strong that we’d all have to stand in a different place and then take it in and pitch it in the barn. Like I say, we were not prepared. We had a big hay rope tied to the barn and then tied to an oak tree and then tied to the porch of the house so we could get back and forth. One guy hung onto the rope and we held each other’s hands to get back and forth. I remember we even were in the calf pens taking calf manure with trowels and . I mean the cow manure or the calf manure into the cracks of the building so the wind wouldn’t come through so bad. That’s about all we could do because you had to stay inside. It was just milk in the morning and milk in the afternoon.

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