Interview with Ed Runge # AIS-V-L-2008-073 Interview # 1: October 24, 2008 Interviewer: Mark DePue Unknown: Okay, Mark. Tape is rolling, and just have your guest give us one clap to synch stuff. DePue: Just clap your hands. Runge: (claps) Unknown: Whenever you’re ready. DePue: Good morning. Today is Friday, October 24, 2008. My name is Mark DePue. I am the director of oral history at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. And today, it’s our distinct pleasure to talk to Dr. Edward Runge. Ed, welcome. Runge: Thank you! Good to be here, Mark. DePue: This is part of our “Agriculture in Illinois” project that we’re doing with the Illinois State Museum as well, one of fifty video interviews we’re doing. And unlike most of these, I thought it might be appropriate to kind of set the stage a little bit, or put this in some kind of a “time and place” if you will, with what’s going on in the United States. Dr. Runge is a trained agronomist; have spent your entire life doing that. I know that your specialty area is soil science, and for a person on the outside, that says, “Oh my, this might be kind of boring.” But I know this is going to be a fascinating discussion. And you have been at the heart of a lot of the things that are in the news right now. Of course, at this point and time, we’re about two weeks Ed Runge Interview # AIS-V-L-2008-073 away from a presidential election; things like ethanol production are very much in the news and in the public dialogue right now, and you’ve been at the heart of that discussion for many, many years. So that’s part of why we’re fascinated to talk to you. Then you get into the subject of commodity prices and why corn goes from two dollars to seven dollars, back to four dollars, and you’ve been at the heart of a lot of that discussion as well. So I think this is about as relevant as you can get in terms of the subject that we’re going to talk about. We always like to start with your childhood and growing up, and I know that you grew up on a farm in Illinois, so let’s start with this: when and where were you born? Runge: I was born in St. Peter, Illinois, in Fayette County, on a little farm. We farmed 160 acres, as I remember it. And we had everything: we had milk cows, we had pigs, we had chickens; we grew oats and wheat, and corn, and we made silage, and all those sorts of things. So we had a lot of work to do. DePue: Describe the soil and the climatic conditions in that part of Illinois. Runge: Well, Fayette County is what they call the “gray soils” of Illinois. So it’s south of the Shelbyville moraine, and the Shelbyville moraine marks the terminus of the darker soils. Here in Sangamon County, you have the deeper loess soils, and they’re dark as well. So the gray soil was lower in fertility than this particular area would be, or the more northern parts of Illinois. DePue: And tell us a little bit about your parents. 2 Ed Runge Interview # AIS-V-L-2008-073 Runge: Well, my parents were born in the late—1898 and 1899, so they’ve passed on. But they farmed all their life. DePue: Their names? Runge: Ed and Bertha Runge. And my mother was a Grandt. She had nine brothers and sisters besides herself, so it was a large family. My father was the youngest of his family. All my aunts and uncles on my father’s side were like grandma and grandpa, because Dad was—his oldest sister was old enough to be his mother. Cousins on my dad’s side were more like uncles than they were like cousins. We had a lot of cousins. DePue: How far back can you trace your family and that piece of land? Runge: I think it goes back to about 1870. I think it was purchased a little later than that. But we have a centennial farm, and we’ve had that for more than ten years. We probably had the farm in our name since about the 1880s, if I remember correctly, from the abstract. But I haven’t looked at it in a long time. DePue: Okay. And you say you were born in 1933, so a child of the Depression? Runge: Yep. I was born in the bottom of it, I guess you would say. Actually, my father bought the farm that we were on probably in the later twenties, so I don’t know whether he paid much for it, but any kind of money was scarce in my growing up periods, particularly through to the end of World War II. Things perked up a little bit in World War II because there was more demand for agricultural commodities. But really, I think I remember four dollar-beans 3 Ed Runge Interview # AIS-V-L-2008-073 some time in the late forties, and that was a big change over what they had been. DePue: You know, those later years of the 1930s, it was still very hard times on the farm. Do you recall much about those years? Runge: Well, you know, I guess everybody was poor. And we didn’t know we were poor. We were self-sufficient. You know, we had to buy overalls and clothes, and salt and pepper and sugar, and things like this, but we canned everything we grew. We had big gardens. DePue: How big a garden do you think you had? Runge: It probably was about a half-acre. One of our punishments if you didn’t get along right with Mom and Dad and your siblings, well, you could always weed the strawberry patch. (laughter) DePue: (laughter) Runge: So weeding the strawberry patch was a place—was kind of like sitting in the corner. (laughter) DePue: But with a very practical end in sight? Runge: Yeah. We never were short of strawberries. (laughter) DePue: Did you have chores every morning you were expected to do? Runge: Oh yeah. Well, I don’t know when we started with our chores, but essentially the routine started at five in the morning. We’ve got to milk cows. That usually took till about six. And then we had breakfast. And then we had to do the rest of the chores—the chickens and the pigs, and things like this. 4 Ed Runge Interview # AIS-V-L-2008-073 And then we went off to school. We walked to schools. We walked two miles. We didn’t walk every day, but we walked more than we rode. And there wasn’t school buses. I went to a Lutheran school in the town of St. Peter, so there was some problem with public school buses picking up Lutheran school kids. That has since dissipated. But anyway, I had a good education, in grade school in particular. DePue: I know back in those days, that were lots of Lutheran churches that still spoke German or other languages. Runge: Yeah. When I was a kid, we had a German service and an English service every Sunday. Then it went to a German communion service every month. I think the pastor that we had changed, and the new one didn’t speak German, so we didn’t have German church except on very rare occasions. DePue: Did your family go to the German service? Runge: I think we went to both. Mostly, we went to the English service, but I used to pray in German. I can’t anymore. (laughter) DePue: Did you speak German at all at home? Runge: A little. My two older brothers spoke more German than I did. There was a feeling that the kids were in school—we’re going to speak English. World War II started, and German just kind of fell out of favor. I remember taking German in grade school until the third grade, and the third grade must have been about when World War II was starting. Anyways, German was dropped. DePue: I want you to tell us a little bit more about—well, first of all, did your father consider himself to be a subsistence farmer? 5 Ed Runge Interview # AIS-V-L-2008-073 Runge: (laughter) No! No. He farmed like everybody else. No, basically we sold wheat, we sold some pigs, we sold eggs and milk on a regular basis. So if all else failed, we lived between egg check and milk check. DePue: How many milk cows did you have? Runge: Well, early on, not very many. We probably had about sixteen or something like that. We all had to milk about three or four cows every morning. And later, after I left home, they went into the dairy business, and I think they might’ve got up to fifty or sixty cows. I don’t remember the exact number. But when the kids all left, Dad decided he wasn’t going to milk the cows, so the cows left in about ’59, if I remember right. DePue: Did either of your parents work off the farm? Runge: No, no. They worked on the farm. Well, my dad did—you know, you have a barn somebody needs put up, why, everybody went and helped.