R: This is Kenneth Rock, and I'm visiting today with Mr. and Mrs. Harold Henkel.

Their home, 15 Burlington, Longmont, Colorado. This is 21st of March, 1977,

and we're talking about some of their experiences. So, which one of you would

like to go first? Mrs. Henkel?

KH: To start in, my name is Katherine Rudy (Rudi) Henkel. My mother--my dad's name

was Peter Rudy, and he came from Pobotschnaja, Russia.

R: Could you spell that if you have it there?

KH: Pobotschnaja, Russia?

R: Mm-hmm.

KH: That would, let's see-

R: Okay, we have it on that other--

KH: There it is, okay, the colony was, um, it's called in German [inaudible], its

colony, and then Pobotschnaja is spelled P-o-b-o-t-s-c-h-n-a-j-a. That is

Russian. That's when the Russian people who wouldn't let the German people

name their colonies after German names anymore. My dad left Russia ahead of my

mother two years, and he went to South America first. And he spent quite some

time in Argentina looking for a home there, and he didn't like it, and he

worked his way into America. In other words, he had to earn money, and he

would go step by step. He came to the port of San Francisco. He was on the

vessel the S.S. San Jose on July 24, 1913.

R: That was after he was in Latin America?

KH: That's right, after he was in Latin America, yes. And of course, he had his

[inaudible] that he had to go to, and in Sugar City, Idaho, which was Mr.

David Weimer, and he also lived in Sugar City, Idaho.

R: How do you spell Weimer?

KH: W-e-i-m-e-r.

R: I say this just to help out our secretary. KH: Okay. The Weimers were a great lot of people; there were a lot of Weimers.

They're like the Schlegels, the Waggeners, and, you know, there's no end to that

name. That's the way it is, was, with the Weimers, too.

R: Do you know if your father was in contact with this Mr. Weimer when he was still

in Russia?

KH: Yes, very much so, because they knew each other.

R: I see.

KH: They knew each other already in the old country.

R: He was from the same village?

KH: Well, that I don't know. The only thing I know is our dialect from Russia, that

Mom and Dad brought, changed when they moved again to live among the Weimer

people.

R: Hmmm.

KH: We got a very distinct German speaking language, and where our folks came from,

when we moved to Longmont, the dialect was just out of this world. I'm, telling

you I had to learn, I had to laugh a lot of times when the people would talk.

Because the dialect where my parents came from. So while they were living among

these people, that came, these Weimers, why they lost that dialect that they

brought from Russia.

R: Oh, I see.

KH: There's quite a difference in it. For example, in German they would say

[inaudible]. That was the dialect of the Weimers. But our dialect, it was

[inaudible]. See the difference, the difference in the words. So, as long as

they lived in Idaho and in the southern part of Colorado, is when they lost that

Pobotschnaja dialect.

R: Um-hmm, um-hmm.

KH: So, which I'm not sorry about [laughs]. And I thought it was these other people

had a plainer German, and you could understand them much better than you could

the dialect-that the Pobotschnaja people brought with them. R: I see.

KH: And beings that Dad came via South America, that, too, helped him lose that

dialect to a certain degree, he was mixed with so many different people over

there.

R: Do you know what year he left Russia?

KH: Well, according to . . .

R: He was in South America for some time, you say.

KH: According to the exact date, now I have a spot right there, when my dad docked

the ship to go to South America, between that time and when he docked America,

it's lost, I cannot find it, unless I will write to somebody in South America

and try to get that information. I cannot find it here.

R: Um-hmm, I see.

KH: And I did not ask may dad. There's nothing on paper. It's not recorded. Only

what is on his citizenship papers--here, and he got into Mexico, evidently, and

docked the, beings that it's a Mexican ship, and docked at San Francisco,

California, you see.

R: I see.

KH: But he did tell me, he had, that he made five stops.

R: From Argentina to San Francisco.

KH: To, no, well, yeah, to San Francisco and then came on in, and that meant earned

money to take and get a ticket again to go so far and then work and then get

another ticket and go so far, and I never did see ray dad's visa in all the

days that I can remember.

R: Do you recall, did he know any Spanish, too?

KH: Yes, very much so. He could speak Spanish. He learned the Spanish in Latin

America.

R: Surely.

KH: Yes, he knew, he could speak to the people here that he worked with. They

couldn't fool him in any way. (Laughing) R: [Laughing] That's good. Now, your mother did not come with him, then?

KH: No, Mama was back in Russia. He had left her with her two sons, which I

recorded, that were not, you know, there were no papers on them, and

she was out there for two years until he had made this circle. That

took him two years to do this.

R: I see.

KH: According to his story, that according to the citizenship papers which

I have before me here, it must have been two years from the time that

he left until he seen her again. Now, that’s the only way I can figure

it out, because it should have been shorter. My mother left on, let's

see, when did she, according to her, she left, well, what would the

date be? She was on the steamship in Germany, the S S. Breslau, and she

came into the United States, according to this, "I arrived at the

United States through the port of Galveston, Texas, under the name of

Anna Marie Rudy, April 6, 1914."

R: I see.

KH: But the paper from Russia is 1912. See, so he must have left

immediately. And that is that lapse I'm talking about, that I haven't

got.

R: I see. Okay.

KH: And again, she, too, had to come to Sugar City, Idaho, but she had a

lot of trouble down at the Galveston port, because her two boys were so

terribly sick.

R: Oh.

KH: The ship came to New York first, and all the way down the coast they

would drop freight, pick up freight, and all. She had to go along. And

then when she got down there, and they wouldn't let her off of the

ship. And she thought she was-- they were already loading the ship and

getting it ready to go back into Russia. And she thought she was being

returned. Until the captain came in and asked why she was there on the

ship, and that she had such a strong visa that she'd have to go if her

two boys died en route. And her boys were still that sick, too. So, she said they put her on the train, and started her for Idaho.

R: From Texas?

KH: From Texas.

R: To Idaho.

KH: Houston, Texas--Galveston,

R: Uh-huh, Galveston-Houston area, and she went directly there with the two

boys, these are your two older brothers, I suppose?

KH: My two older brothers, yes. And Dad was working in the sugar mill, and Mom

they put up a white tent for her and a block stove, and a bed which had just

one of those little flat springs on it, no mattress, no nothing, and he got

some canvases from the sugar factory, which probably had little teeny hole

in it, that couldn't be used, they were afraid to use it for accidents, and

she said it didn't take her long to clean up some of those and make

themselves a mattress out of corn and straw. And then she finally had her

few things that she could put on her bed, and she had the earthen floor, she

patted it down with water and made it as slick as glass, she said. And her

cupboards were orange crates, and she used flour sacks for curtains. And she

said that's the way they spent their first summer i n America, and she

worked beets by herself. She thinned beets and Daddy was working in the

sugar mill, and by fall, she says we were able to find us a little home to;

a little house.

R: In Idaho.

KH: In Idaho. Then, that first year, that was when I came along, that was when

they lost that first son, Henry. He was the one that drowned in that small

ditch of water which probably wasn't any higher than this. It was one of

those little tributary ditches that ran off, that's where they lost their

first son that they brought out of Russia.

R: Okay, one of them who was so sick.

KH: One of them. They got over it, they got over it, but he drowned here, in

America, see. R: In Idaho, uh-huh.

KH: And then Dad says, "Now, we're going to farm." And they farmed for two years,

approximately two years in Idaho, only to be froze out both years. That was

the [inaudible] crop near the Tetons; it would freeze maybe as late as June.

In June, you know, they lost so heavily. Then is when these Weimer people,

and a lot of German people decided to move to Wiley, Colorado. And there is

where they started to farm.

R: All right. Now where in Colorado?

KH: Wiley.

R: Wiley. Okay, yeah.

KH: Now, you remember Wiley.

R: I remember Wiley, yes, indeed, I do.

KH: That's where they moved to.

R: Okay.

KH: Now, my real memory of my parents, there's is where it started.

R: It starts in Wiley.

KH: In Wiley. The flu was the first one. The 1918 flu was my first real memory of

my mother and dad, where they really had some trouble. And then my mother,

all of us were sick, I have a sister that still has an ill effect from that,

and my dad and a Spanish woman that was living, well, there was a Spanish

family on the place, her family was all sick, but she didn't get sick, and my

dad didn't get sick, but all the neighborhood got sick that was in a square

mile. And they would go around to every farmyard, feed the animals, milk the

cows, build the fires in the stove, throw oranges on the beds, and put water

beside their beds and go to the next farm. They were all day just keeping up,

and then, of course, picking up and finding the authorities about the dead

and so on.

R: That must have been a terrible epidemic.

KH: That was a terrible epidemic. And I remember then when my sisters got better

and they went out and they started to clean up in the cupboards and so on, and so forth, you know how children are, but one of the girls

suffered severe eye, generated by a high fever. They had a very high fever

for three days. And they didn't know about the cold ice you could have put

on her face like that, but the doctor got so far down there that he didn't

know what to do anymore, so he just decided, he started on my mother. He

said, "I'm gonna give every one of them a teaspoon full of poison."

R: Poison?

KH: Plain poison. And she says, and my doctor didn't tell her until they were

all running around, that he had started giving them poison and that is what

got rid of that flu. But they would never give us the name of it. He

wouldn't tell her anything, he wouldn't, nobody knows what the poison

actually was. It must have some been some kind of a medication that if you

got a whole teaspoonful, it was poisonous to the system.

R: Yeah, uh-huh.

KH: Well, that is what got the flu.

R: But it was an antidote for the flu.

KH: And he got them on their feet in a hurry.

R: Uh-huh. So everbody pulled through, then.

KH: That got that medication, but nobody knows. I don't know, my mother didn't

know, the doctor wouldn't give out the information. That was one of the sad

things, too. That again there, Dad didn't rest no more. He didn't want the

farm any longer. They had a few beets on that place, I was too small to

work; so were the rest of the children, I remember the beets.

R: Was he renting a t that time?

KH: Yes, it was, we were sharecroppers at that time.

R: Uh-huh.

KH: And then he decided to go and get a better farm. A better farm it was. But

dirtier than anything that I have ever witnessed in my life. [laughing]

R: (Laughing) Where was this? KH: This again was in Wiley. It was owned by a man from Germany, he was German,

too. And he was, and see, he couldn't get good sharecroppers at that time, you

see, the German people had just moved in. They went in and they looked at this

farm, and I went along, too. The weeds were so high, Mom and I got lost. The

house was so filthy and dirty you didn't, when you looked in, if you'd turn

around three times in front of the door, and then look in again, everything and

rodents till you couldn't stand the smell of it around the place. Well, they

were good enough to say, "We'll let you have the place just for”, you know,

they didn’t have to pay no rent or anything, “and we will help clean it."

There's a place where there were the three orchards. And I mean those were

beautiful orchards. There wasn't a fruit that wasn't to be had there.

R: What, okay, as I was going to say, do you remember what kind of fruit, but

there must have been several different kinds.

KH: Several? What do you mean, “several"? There was apples, there were ten, twelve

varieties of apples, there were peaches, pears, plums, cherries, mulberries,

strawberries, currants, every type that you could think of. Even the crabapple

for jelly-making,; the jam-making type of fruits. We had three of them.

R: Um-hmm, I see.

KH: And by the time we got that place into real good production, it produced

terrificly. But the work was so hard that sometimes I just wonder how our

parents stood it, because a lot of times, well, if some people wanted it,

they'd come and pick their own fruits and pay the folks for it, but there were

also those beautiful people that couldn't get their fingers dirty, either, in

those days.

R: There are always people like that.

KH: Yes, and a lot of times my dad would go clear off as far as Eads and Kit Carson

and sell all his fruit. And the rest of the crop, we raised beets on that place

I can remember, once. And we always had to have somebody come in and do them,

and he said, the boss didn't want it any more, and he didn't want them anymore. So he just raised hay and grain and that was our, and it's still that way

at Wiley. Hay is the main crop in a lot of Colorado, around that area.

R: It's really more diversified at farming than beet farming, as such there.

KH: No, there’s hardly no row crops there, corn, yes. They raise corn and, but

it's grain and, where we, we were settled down for quite a number of years,

until the landlord’sboys got big, and Dad's health began to fail. And then

he decided that he wanted to move to Longmont, and that was in '29.

R: In twenty-nine to Longmont.

KH: Um-hmm, and what a year. Here's where we got the sad introduction to the

beets.

R: [Laughing] Okay, the sad introduction to the beets, yes, uh-huh. Well, let

me back up just a moment here now, if I can. You must have been in Wiley,

and you say that's where your memories began, during the years of World War

I, I suppose?

KH: I knew a little about it, but I wasn't much interested in it, you know. As

a child, you don't really care, and then the news media, we never had

radios, we never had anything but a little newspaper that came once a week

out of that little town of Wiley.

R: Okay, uh-huh.

KH: So. . .

R: That would have been an English-language paper, too, I suppose?

KH: That was an English-language paper, and the folks would say, "Well, could

you read it for us?" There was a lot of times we didn't even understand

what we were reading.

R: Um-hmm. Did you speak German at home at that time?

KH: Very much. Our home tone was definitely German. [inaudible].

R: Ja. [Laughing].[inaudible].

KH: In other words, I told you that I could speak good in German, there's

nobody gonna sell me in that language. R: That's right, that's when you know the language that well , why, then you get

along.

KH: You know, my mother and dad never spoke anything but German.

R: Um-hmm, okay. And you as children, then, spoke German in the home growing up?

KH: Yes, growing up, and also, when I entered the first grade, I didn't know one

letter in English. And I did also run away from school in first grade quite a

number of times, where I'd take my lunch pail and go out and join my dad in

the fields. [Laughing]. It wasn't for me, not the first grade, anyway.

R: This was the school in Wiley, I suppose.

KH: Just a 1ittle country school, just a little tiny school out in the country.

R: Right. Now let me back up one more time, too, if we can. Would you give me

your full name and when you were born, too, so that we'll have that on the

tape as well?

KH: Katherine Henkel. I have no middle name. It's Katherine Rudy Henkel.

R: Yes, Henkel came a little later.

KH: Yeah, that came, I'm so used to saying it, you know, that.

R: We just get to talking here, and that I forget that we need to get a couple of

those other things down here, too. It's Rudy, is it not?

KH: It can be Rudi, which it was used as first. And then when we went to school,

the teachers put it Rudy.

R: How did your parents spell it?

KH: My dad signed his checks R-u-d-i. So you've got to use the y and the i both.

Yes. And . . .

R: And how did you spell Katherine? That can be spelled different ways, too.

KH: K-a-t-h-e-r-i-n-e. Here’s why.

R: Oh, yes.

KH: And there for a while in Wiley he wrote it in German, like your dad did,i.

R: So either y or i. Uh-hmm, okay. And you were born when?

KH: I was born in Sugar City, Idaho, 1915. April 21.

R: Okay.

KH: Right now, I wouldn't think it would be so pretty up there. At that time, that big dam wasn't there. That's exactly where this , . .

R: Where the dam broke, and everything washed away.

K: Everything washed . . .

HH: Rexburg, Sugar City, and that whole area.

KH: Yes. I sent my nephew over to look up the vital statistics with my brother's

grave up in the vital statistics office, and they told him to go home.

R: Hmm.

HH. It washed away. Cemeteries, everything. They tell me there were caskets going

down in the Snake River.

R: Yes. Did you by any chance see the pictures in Time magazine, for example?

KH: No, I didn't.

R: Of the dam breaking through?

KH: Well, we saw that part of it, yes.

R: Maybe you saw it on television or something, and a tremendous water flow.

KH: But the thing of it is, it's a sad thing, and I'm scared to go up there now

and really, really ask about it, because I did send my nephew. I was also,

here’s my baptismal certificate, I was also baptized on the 23rd of May, 1915,

in the Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church at Salem, Idaho. So there's, I tried,

and there's still the gold seal on my certificate.

R: Um-hmm. Handsome certificate.

KH: Handsome? You ought to see this one.

R: And it's printed in German, too, isn't it?

KH: Yes, they're all printed in German. I can read every bit of it.

R: Uh-huh. Katerina, Peter Rudi, Anna. Um-hmm. Your mother's name was Schlegel?

KH: Yes, her maiden name, Anna Marie Schlegel Rudi.

R: Schlegel. Uh-huh. Okay. And there were two older brothers, and then you

mentioned a sister, I guess later on, so how many children were there in your

family?

KH: I skipped something there that I didn't tell you that happened in Wiley,

Colorado. We lost the second boy, Pete, in Wiley, that was killed by a horse. R: Oh, my.

KH: Yeah.

R: Thrown off a horse, or?

KH: No, he was out, they had a deal going down there in the summer when the last

cutting of hay was finished. They picked the horses out and pastured them on

the range, and that was across the Fort Line Canal. And he had this one, we

had a team that we always kept at home. Well, he took this one horse on

Sunday morning, which of course was very objection, the Book objected to it,

but knowing the boy, he wanted to go help this fellow round up these horses

that day, and down there we had a lot of badgers. And the horse, he had a

beautiful saddle, and he had his legs in the stirrup, and this poor animal

stepped in one of those badger holes with the back leg, and by trying to get

out, he fell and he was caught in the stirrup with his one leg. All the horse

did was try to get that leg out and caught him in the back of the neck and

broke it.

R: Oh, boy.

KH: That's all. Now that ends the story of the two Russian-born boys.

R: Uh-huh.

KH: They were both accidents.

R: Hmm. And the rest of your family, then, was born in this country?

KH: Yes, the rest of the family from me on down. R: Uh-huh, I see.

KH: Those were the two oldest boys.

R: Were there other brothers?

KH: Oh, yes, here. Yes, we had some more brothers.

R: One doesn't like to hear about those things, but they happened in every

family.

KH: Accidents, we had bad accidents with horses. I don't know, I think a lot of

people wi11 tell you the same story, that they had plenty of runaways, we

had lots of cave-ins, it was nothing for you to be driving along and there'd

be a, I don't know why we had those cave-ins, it seems like it had probably some, what do they call these underground drain ditches?

HH: In them days, they'd take either one-by-fours or one-by-sixes, you know, and take

it lengthwise, and they'd just join them on the corners, you know, where a square

tube-like or tunnel. And they'd bury them, you know, and in maybe ten or fifteen

years they'd rot out, and all that water would take the dirt out from under there

and you’d trot along and the horse or tractor [inaudible] would break in. You

know, they weren't laying too deep, they'd dig them by hand in them days, so

they'd probably only get about two feet in the ground.

R: Well, this is under the road, you mean?

HH: No.

KH: Non, no, no, in the wet fields, in the flatlands, you know.

R: Oh, for the irrigation water.

HH: Well, no, they drained the water out of the fields.

KH: Out of the fields.

HH: To keep it from turning to seep and alkali,i f you know what I'm talking about.

R: Yeah, I do there, uh-huh.

HH: In some areas, like where she was, they irrigated all winter down there, and

there the ground was awful wet in the spring, so they needed to drain that out,

keep that salt, if you didn't drain it out, the salt would work to the top, and

then you'd plant a crop, and it would just burn it off. But if you’d keep that

water out of the bottom, keep your water table down, that salt would go down, and

then you'd have good land on top.

R: Hmm. And this is typical of the Wiley area?

HH: Well, it's typical all over. We had some up and down the valley out here at

Brighton.

R: In the South Platte Valley.

HH: Not right in the Platte Valley. We was five miles east, we was over a ridge,

there was another creek went down through there, they called it the Boxelder

Creek, and you get down close to the creek on some of those flatlands, and it was all pasture, and then they were running out of land 1ike they were

everywhere else, so they started draining this pastureland, you know,

and drained it into the creek, so it would dry up so they could plow it

and farm it. And we had that same, not as much as she was talking

about, but that's, I knew right away what she was talking about.

R: But the, they were underground, drainage ditches, and then they had the

ground over the top of them. It was no open ditch at all, in this case?

HH: No then see, you know, it opened up because the dirt would all wash

away when these boards rotted out and the dirt caved in, this water was

running through there, you know, maybe three, four feet in diameter, if

you could see it, just keep you were all right, but if the then layer

on top there, you know, about six inches deep was across the top of

that hole, you couldn't tell until you drove on it, and down you go.

R: It was a regular trap, wasn't it?

KH: They were very much traps, because then . . .

HH: But then, you weren't too deep, only a couple of feet, you know . . .

KH: Well. . .

R: But that's enough to break a horse's leg. And.

[inaudible].

KH: What I wanted to bring up there, was so many times these fellows were,

would go out at night in the dark, you see, your water was run so many

days and it was off so many days, so they would run day and night, see.

Well, on one particular night I remember distinctly, it happened on

this farm that we were living down there at Wiley, this fellow didn't

show up, and she, I don't know what it was with the wives down there.

The minute those fellows would go out to set water, they were wide

awake. There was no such thing as sleeping. So long it takes to get

back, and by the time they didn't show up, they already started to

light the lanterns and go out and try looking for these fellows. Well, they found some, in those holes where they couldn't get out, and here

this water was gushing down in there, see, well, they Would have drowned by

morning. There's no way they could get out, that kept breaking off, you

know, and going down, you know, [inaudible]. That happened, and those were

some of the sad accidents. The horses would fall into those things, or the

horse would miss it and the piece of machinery, the wheel would drop into

it, or something would happen down in that area, in Wiley. Happened quite

often. There was terrific accidents. And then there's the funny part about

it, too. They had those beautiful buggies that they'd go to church with, a

black team, the most beautiful harnesses, they had wrecks on the middle of

the road.

R: In the middle of the road?

KH: Yes.

R: On the way to church?

KH: On the way to church. [Laughing] Or Saturday night.

R: I was gonna say, are you talking about Sunday morning or Saturday night?

[Laughing]

HH: Saturday night you could understand, but Sunday morning, I had never heard

of that one.

KH: At home, they would. No fooling. They'd come tearing this way and the other

one that way. The other way and catch those wheels, and, man, here they'd

go.

R: Wow. Just spinning around.

KH: And killed, too. Got killed. It's funny, but, you laugh about it, now, but

at that time, when there was an accident, why that wasn't, and another

thing, we had terrific accidents down there with lightning.

R: Uh-huh.

KH: They would, I don't know why, animals would get killed, men with their

shovels sticking straight up in the air.

R: Oh, yes, uh-huh, it's attracted to that, isn't it.?

K: It's attracted to that. They would not, sometimes you'd just have to yell at

them to get that shovel down and turn it the other way, and, but as far as

the farming was concerned down there, we had a happy time, and we worked so hard till sometimes you thought you couldn't stand-,to work another day.

But we always had cows to milk, [inaudible], hogs to slop, [inaudible].

R: Dairy cattle or just cattle farming up on your own place?

KH: No, just enough at that time to make butter and feed the family and, at that

time parents didn't raise enough cattle that meant to feed a whole bunch on

the place.

R: Okay, now when you were talking about these buggies, were you talking about

the German people?

KH: Sure, there were Germans, there were probably some other ones, Swedes or

Norwegians, or whatever you wanted to call them.

HH: Most people were driving horses in those days. Before 1920 there weren't

very many automobiles in the country. They had them in the big cities, but,

not out in the country.

KH: I can also remember our first Ford, too, our Model T, quite the thing.

R: Along about when, would you say?

KH: Oh, golly, that must have been right down there in about '21, '22, something

like that, in that area, when they hear all about that. I can't remember the

exact year. But there was another thing there. They had to crank those

things, you know, there was no way to start it, and they had these funny

little coils on the inside, and if one of them would go bad, they'd have so

much trouble. I've seen many of them beat those cars with the crank

[Laughing]. And they had to go get a horse and go to church or to town, or

something, but one thing we didn't do, we didn't go to town but once a week.

R: And would that have been on Saturday?

KH: That was usually on Saturday night. There was never a time on Saturday, that

is, during the day to go shopping. And the clothing was bought through, oh,

shortly before school. Shortly before school, or something. Another thing that I really enjoyed down there and that was the threshing. When I read this

article on the threshing, my mother and dad, they were always notified about

two days ahead when they thought the crew would be coming in. My dad didn't

own a threshing machine. And she would hire herself out, a young woman, and

the average man was between twenty-five and thirty. They needed now, too, you

know, to pick up these shocks, and that was quite a lot of hand work. And she

would prepare oh, a ten-gallon crock of these nice, long [inaudible], she’d

get that ready.- She would butcher fowl, mostly fowl. Sometimes Dad would

say beef was all right, but she had so much of it that that's what she would

do. And they would bake every day. You couldn't go to town and buy a whole

bunch of bread. This had to be done.

R: Now, did your mother have one of these so-called summer kitchens?

KH. Well, we’ll come to this. Not in Wiley,

R: Oh, okay.

KH: Not in Wiley. She didn't have a summer kitchen in Wiley. It was the house.

R: In the house.

KH: Plus she had a stove sitting out in the yard. Where she did most of her

cooking so the house wouldn't get too hot. She also had a, and then when

she'd have to be up by four o'clock in the mornings, because she also baked

then something for breakfast, pancakes, something heavy, that would hold,

know, and I can't recall ever going out in the mornings. Usually in the

mornings it wasn't so bad down there in that part of the state. 110, 109,

105, was usually the heat of the summer down there.

R: Not so bad, you say (laughing).

KH: Not so bad, but in the afternoons, after they had had their lunch, why, she

would always send us out with a great big porcelain pail.. Mother was really

real particular about what she put her food into. It had to be crockery, or

porcelain. Aluminum she would take the axe to. Because it wasn't good stuff

at that time. So we would have to take a great big porcelain pail of pickles

which she had all cut, and water out to every man, because they needed salt. Henk

R: Oh, yes. In that kind of temperature, working out in the fields.

KH. Well, I can't remember doing it in the morning, but I remember doing it in the

afternoons, the mornings were too busy to do that. And then she’d get ready

again for the next day, you know they'd have to work in the afternoons, to

,cook, and bake, and stuff, but she fed them three times a day. And that was a

lot of food for a woman. To put out that fast and not ever go to town. And

we baked their pies, and there was always pie on my mother's

table, with all that food around there,

R: Umhmm, from those orchards.

KH: From those orchards, all the nice jams and jellies, and those fellows would

never go home. They were always staying with their team. They would sleep out

in the haystack somewhere, or something. like that, they would always take

good care of their animals while they were at our place.

R: Would it be a group of German fellows who came through to help with the

threshing, or were they all mixed up?

KH: No, not all of them. Sometimes, they'd even come from out of state, didn't

they, Harold? A lot of times they weren't always Germans, And the fellow who

had the threshing machine, I noticed then that he was not a German.

R: Uh-huh so they would come through similar to the way combine crews come

through subsequently.

KH: Yeah, and they could only cover so much territory and that was so much slower.

R: Sure.

KH. So much slower. There was more than one. Because he always, my dad always

picked the same man all the while that we were down there.

R: Well that must mean that your father was speaking English by this time, too.

KH: Very good, very good. He could speak English and Spanish and German at that

time. So he was doing real well at that time, but then there I already noticed

that too much hay, they were such proud people, they had so much pride, they

wouldn't have gone to the place and picked up a stamp for food they'd have

starved to death. And they were so particular. About how that stack looked. R: The haystack. Hen KH: The haystack. It had to be raked every day, oh my goodness, the world would have

come to an end if that thing hadn't of looked just right.

R: I know what you mean.

KH: Well, they were very, very proud people. I mean I got a piece of that, too. I've

given up a little now, too, like they did, but they were very proud. The

threshing, the threshing was really something very nice. Now your summer kitchen,

that we didn't get into until we came to Longmont.

R: And that would have beef. after '29. .

KH: Yes. We had a beautiful little summer kitchen there. That was something, that

summer kitchen. I enjoyed that thing you wouldn't believe. In the spring of the

year, like May, maybe already in April, we'd clean it up and get it all ready,

there were those three windows or four, enough for the air, whichever way it

came, it went through. And she'd have those little curtains you'd make just out

of flour sacks, and they had the, oh, we had to be so careful with the flies, at

that time we didn't have sprays or anything like that, and I still can't remember

the name of that black paper, she always had a flat plate and she'd put a little

water in it, and lay this black paper on it, and the minute a fly would get a

little of this, she wouldn’t fly very far no more.

R: Hmm. Sort of a flypaper, was it?

KH: Sort of a flypaper, at that time, and this great big table, we were ten children,

two parents, that was twelve people three times a day.

R: Oo-hoo. A lot of cooking for somebody.

KH: You bet. And my mother would can, on an average, from 800 to 1,000 quarts a year.

Summer.

R: She had a vegetable garden, then, I assume.

KH: Well, whether she had it or not the- she’d go find the pickle somewhere or, you

know.

R: Okay.

KH: What I meant, is.

R: Yeah. Hen

KH: This was her, what she needed. That didn't leave out the barrel of apples

she'd pickle, two barrels of watermelon she'd pickle, and I don't, I would

say, on an average, about twenty gallons of sauerkraut that she'd put up,

maybe more than that, and that, and then, of course, Dad always grew his own

meat.

R: Uh-huh.

KH: So, and lots of potatoes. The potatoes as a rule, they'd go out and buy

from a farm or somewhere if there was an area where there were potatoes grown,

but in Wiley, I can't remember potatoes ever being grown out-here. We had to

buy them.

R: I see.

KH: Same with the sugar. But, then this, this comes to Longmont, then it’s where

we had to learn how to work beets. There’s here the backaches started.

That’s at that time then, Harold, how late did they use the wagons here?

Around Longmont?

HH: They phased them in and out of there, I would say about...

KH: 1918?

HH: No, right after the Depression.

KH. After the Depression would be in the thirties. Thirties.

HH: Trucks started showing up and the wagons started going out of style. And the

reason, the big reason for it, was that's when they started building these

state highways with the blacktop surface, and they wouldn't let you drive on

there with the wagons, so a lot of people had to buy trucks in order to haul

their produce to market. Especially if they had to go on a road somewhere.

R: Yeah. Now the wagon wheels, would they have been...

HH: Steel-banded.

R: Steel-banded wheels, and that would tear up the blacktop.

KH: It cut it.

HH: It cut it.

R: Yeah.

HH: Left marks on it. They just wouldn't let you on, so they . . . R: So that's when the transition, then, to the trucks came

KH: That's when it changed. We had some little Model T trucks, and some had some

International trucks, and so on and so forth.

HH: There was much earlier than that I got in mind where we. our, first truck : we

bought was in 1922.

KH: Well, that's about the time.

HH: My dad started the milk route, and he bought the truck at that time and then

they had a 25-miler, we had a ’27 Chevrolet, and then after, like I say

after 1930, 1932, that's when your better equipped one came into play then.

R: Where were you at that time?

HH: At Brighton.

R: At Brighton. Why don't we get some of this basic information about your husband

here, for a moment, and then we can just sore to converse back and forth?

HH: Almost at the end of my tape. Why don't we just, I'll turn my tape and we’ll

start from there.

R: Okay. Let me follow up here on Longmont. Were you in town or were you out on a

farm when you came here?

KH: We lived out on the farm all the time. Not very far from where we're living

now.

R: To the west of Longmont?

KH: Right to the west.

R: I see.

KH: The west area. And then, after we finally, we decided to go east, and as we

went east, we kept going further east, like Fort Lupton, and that's where Dad

quit farming, that's where he retired from Fort Lupton.

R: So you've had several different places, here, from Longmont to Fort Lupton.

KH: Four, to be exact.

R: And this would have been during the 1930's, I guess.

KH: Well, the thirties, when the Depression hit here, we were right straight west of

Longmont, here, what might be called the Nelson Road, we went, I went to the

Nelson School at that time. Although we had lived on the Tracy Place over here, and I went to this little school, which now is a church which was

called the Burlington School. Right over here. About five houses over here

that’s where I went to school.

R: The Buddhist Temple now?

KH: That's right, that's where I went to school.

R: You went to school there.

KH: Yeah. That was a little schoolhouse.

R: This was elementary school, then, for you.

KH: Yes, it was. This was all farming ground here, where all these houses are

now.

R: Now, were beets here in this, this is kind of high.

KH: Not on top of this hill. Not on this hill. No. But right, where you come

up, that’s where the drop was, that's where the land was real good here.

R: Um-hmm. Toward the river, or the creek, whatever it is? What's the name of

that? There was a . . .

KH: St. Vrain, I think .St. Vrain Creek.

R: There was a sign right beside the street, and I registered to the fact that

there was a sign, but I didn't read it, as I went past. Okay.

KH: And there was no such a thing as anybody hauling you to school. Only during

the wintertime when the snow was real deep, and that was with horse. Horse

and wagon. Otherwise, you walked. We lived right down here, and two and a

half miles, every morning and every night. We didn't need any jogging of any

kind, and we had our chores to do before we left, and our lunchpails to get,

there were six of us going to school, and when we got home our chores were

waiting for us. And they were all done before we got to sit down and study.

The whole thing. And another thing is I did like my school teacher,

especially my eighth grade schoolteacher, Mrs. Darby. She never piled a whole

lot of work on us at night. She always worked with us in the building in the

daytime, and she made sure we'd have our work done as much as possible. Lot

of times we h a d t o take some words home we didn't know h o w to s p e l l or

s o m e t h i n g like t h a t , and write them twenty times, or something like

that, but we learned more under some of these old teachers than some of the Hen

twelfth grade.

R: I believe it. K

H: Do you believe me on this?

R: Yes, I do.

KH: All those women really worked with their students. And we still managed to

farm and a lot of your teachers and a lot of your pastors’ wives, were out

working with us in the summertime. Would you believe that?

R: In the beet fields?

KH: In the fields.

R: Uh-huh. Well, this is what I was going to ask you, now, you mentioned working

in the summertimes. Did the work in the fields interfere with your schooling?

KH: Oh, yes. And when the fall came, oh, yeah, the truant officers would send

letters out quite often.

R: Okay. The truant officer sent papers after you?

KH: Oh, yes. Quite a number of times. In fact, he came into the field a number of

times and said, “Mr. Rudi I'm going to take all your children and you,

tomorrow morning, they'd better all be in school." And he said, "Well, that's

just fine you can come out and get their beet work done." He just didn't

argue with him, he says, "They'll be in school tomorrow,” Mind it, too,

“Well, I better not lose any of my crop”. Well, we stayed at home, and nine

times out of ten, it was only a month, three weeks, sometimes four weeks, we'd

be through, and we'd had some very good teachers that helped us catch up on

our work, and I didn't stay in one grade two years at all. Still helped at

home.

R: Yeah, yeah.

KH: And I was in many a spelling bee, came out on top, I got many awards in my

penmanship, and I loved geography, that was one of my favorites, and I forgot

it all (laughing).

R:- Oh, no. Not all. Uh-huh, right.

KH. But as far as education is concerned, then, after I got through the school here,

that's when the Depression hit. That's when the banks closed, that's when there

were some tears because I couldn't go to high school, there wasn't any money,

and that's when Longmont had just was two blocks, and they dared you to cross

that line. In other words, when you do, you pay so much money. To get a little

bit more of an education.

R: Well, you mean tuition to go to school inside the city limits?

KH: Yeah, in town inside the city limits, which probably wasn't four miles square.

Those that were in the town got their education, but those outside the town

didn't unless you were rich enough to pay that tuition to get into that high

school.

R: I see. Now there were no such things as school buses in those days?

KH : Oh, no, not here.

R: Okay. I'm just sort of curious. So . . .

KH: It wasn't until here, when we had this school reorganization, when Longmont

voted, now, I have a very sticky cockleburr about that. When Longmont outvoted

the outlying areas that had buses, like Erie, Frederick, well Mead, I don't

think, had buses, and they went out and took them all. Took this whole district

and brought them buses all to Longmont. And then they made a district out of

it. It wasn't the Longmont people that had those buses, it was the outlying

areas that had them. They were the ones that were bonded for these buses. And

they were the ones that, there's where my sisters got to go to high school

then.

R: That had been into the 1940's? Perhaps? That late?

KH: No, that was here in 19--um,

R: Before the second World War?

KH: When did we have that fight?

HH: Well, you're getting that mixed up with the reorganization of the schools.

KH: Yeah, there were schools with buses, but Longmont never had buses until then.

HH: They had a high school there at Frederick.

KH: Yes, but they had buses. HH: Yeah.

KH: But Longmont didn't have buses. That's what I'm trying to point through, to Mr.

Rock at that time.

HH: I guess they didn't really need them if everybody could walk to school.

KH: They could walk to school here or drive. But they didn't have buses here.

R: Um-hmm, okay.

KH: But when we lived out of Fort Lupton, there were buses, the rural people had

their own buses, yes, to send their children to high school here. Yes. Very

much so. But we paid for those buses.

R: I see. Uh-huh. Yeah.

KH: But then when the reorganization hit, that's when Longmont got buses. I mean,

through the outlying areas they pulled these buses in, see.

R: I see, okay. Well, let me just take this a bit further, and then we'll go over

here just a second. Now, Longmont and four [inaudible] farms all the way to Fort

Lupton, would you say. When did you go to Brighton? Do you remember what year

that was? Was that when you were married?

KH: No. I was in Brighton, I worked how many years, in Brighton about two or three

years before we were married. See. what I'd do is I'd come out and help the folks

in the summertime and in the wintertime I would be working in Brighton

for three dollars a week and five maybe.

R: What did you do?

KH: I was just in the kitchen in a house, just helping some elderly people. That was

all there was I could do. There were no jobs.

R: Um-hmm. This would have been in the thirties, then?

KH: That's right, it was in the thirties. And that's where we met. In Brighton. No--

we lived up on top of the hill in Fort Lupton, it was through the church -where

we met. And we always went to the Congregational Church at that time, I was

confirmed in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and then the reason my parents went

to the Congregational Church was because of the prayer meeting group that always

met in the afternoons. Henk

R: Would you explain that just a moment?

KH: Can I explain it? Yes.

R. Yeah, I mean wouldn’t they have, been working during the afternoons?

KH: On Sundays?

R: I'm sorry. Okay. All right.

KH: They liked that prayer meeting group. That's where a lot of these songs are

coming from, that they're being now trying, they're working so hard to keep so

that we don't lose them. That's where the Olanders are working, they have all

those tapes of those songs, and that originated in Russia, because there was

no minister sometimes as high as three months in one church. And then they'd

meet in the houses, and have their own little service while they weren't

ministers. You understand. And then they would just have what you would call

a little, a service of their own. And this is the way they would keep up their

faith.

R: All right. Now, then, your parents, then, when they went to these Sunday

afternoon prayer meetings, there was no church service in the morning?

KH: Oh, yes, they'd. go to the one in the morning and they'd go to the one in the

afternoon, and then at night, we'd go again. To the youth group.

R: Okay.

KH: Three times on Sundays.

R: Then Sunday was really a day for socializing among all the German people via

the church by means of the church.

KH: There were no theaters open at that time, there were no stores open, there was

no such a thing, and most people didn't work on Sundays, there was no such a

thing as going out and taking a team and working unless you were a Seventh-Day

Adventist or somebody like that. That was the day that belonged to the Lord at

that time, and they made it very, very, clear and plain to us, too.

R: The ministers, you mean?

KH: No, the parents (laughing).

R: The parents. Okay. H KH: The parents said, That's it. That's it. You could milk the cows and so on,

but, that's it.

R: Right. But otherwise, that was it.

KH. Yeah. When Saturday rolled around, they'd both shout. Well, we had to cook

and eat but our parents were strict on that part of it. They were until

their dying day. They kept that Sunday a holy day. If they could possibly

do it, except when the water was running in the summertime, you know, and it

was turned on and you had your three days and still, to this day, they'd go

out and set their water and go in and put on their suits and go to church

and come home and set their water and put on their suits and go to church

again. You have to admire the spunk and the way they kept their rules in

their homes and the children, too. The children were all in line. We didn't

have anybody going out and smoking marijuana or anything like that. We’d

act up some and we had our bad little things, too.

R: Okay. Maybe I'd better ask you about that in a moment. Okay.

Mr. Henkel, would you like to talk for a moment, and we'll get some

information on you, and then...

HH: Where do you want to start?

R: Could we get some of this information about where you were born and about

your parents, at least, initially, and then we can go on and sort of talk

about your experiences growing up.

HH: Yeah, I was born in Kolb, Russia, August the 22nd, 1912.

R: That's K-o-l-b?

HH: Right. And this is the Russian name right here. Now if you want to

pronounce it, . . .

R: Resh-ko-vat-ka, I guess. Peskowatka. Uh-huh. Okay. ,

HH: That's the Russian name for the village. I don't know whether it’d still be

on the map today, or not. And my father's name was George Henry Henkel, and

he was born September 11, 1880, and he was born in Kolb, and my mother's

name was Marie Barbara Schreiner, and she was born August the 13th, 1887, in Kolb.

R: Uh-huh, I see. So from the village of Kolb.

HH: Right.

R: Um-hmm. And did you have any brothers or sisters who were also born over

there and you all came over together?

HH: Yeah, I had two brothers and two sisters that were born, they were older

than I am. They were also born in that area, and then I had four brothers

and one sister that were born in this country after we got here.

R: Okay. When did your parents come over here?

HH: Well, they started out together. They got as far as Germany, and Mom didn't

pass the physical, so they were stuck and, as I just found out here last

week from my older sister, that they finally made the decision that Dad was

gonna go on into America, and she turned around and went back to the folks.

R: All the way back to Russia?

HH: All the way back into Russia.

R: My goodness.

HH: Yeah. And what happened, she had trouble with her eyes, I guess, and then

she was pregnant with me, that was my fault, I .guess (laughing).

R: Oh, I see.

HH: And they couldn't very well, see, they needed, I guess, to do some surgery,

or something, I don't know just what it was, but this was the main reason

that they couldn't do anything at that time, so she went back. Then after I

was born in August, then along about late in October or early in November, I

don't know the exact date yet, my sister couldn't remember it, why, she

started out again. And she got back to Bremen, Germany, to where she was

before, and still had the same trouble, so she went into the hospital then,

and they got some surgery on her eye. I don't know, she didn't know either

what it was, whether it was cataracts, or something, she said she had some

kind of a growth. Whether they considered this contagious or what, I don't

know. R: But one hears about glaucoma sometimes.

HH: Yeah, but it took about three months before she got out of the hospital then,

till they finally turned her loose, and then we proceeded on into this

country. And we met Dad in Culbertson, Nebraska, about the 30th of June,

1913.

R: I see.

HH: That's where he had come to was working on the Burlington Railroad in

the meantime, and he would send money back so that she could come on in. And

that's about all the information I have on that particular part of the story.

I have the...

R: Your parents would have come through New York, perhaps?

HH: No they came through, well I don't know where Dad came in, we don't have any

record of that, but my mother came with us kids, we came through Philadelphia.

R: Philadelphia. In 1913.

HH: 1913, yeah, headed over on the ship S.S. [Chemmitz?] Now I don't know, she

didn't know whether that was a German ship or what nationality, what flag it

was flying.

R: I would guess it was German, but I would have to verify that.

HH: Doesn't really matter.

R: They arrived in Philadelphia on the 30th of May?

HH: About. She wasn't too sure, she thought it was on Memorial Day, but she just

couldn't remember, you know, she was, I think, thirteen years old.

R: Was your older sister, then, with your mother, at that time?

HH: Yeah, she was with her all the time.

R: I see.

HH: Yeah, she went back with her, then came back in again on the second trip.

R: Uh-huh, I see. Okay.

HH: And then he worked up there until about sometime in 1914, is when they left

Nebraska and they come to Loveland. HH: Loveland, Colorado, and he worked for, I don't know, about a year, I would

imagine, for a sheep-feeder farmer, and then the sugar factory in the fall and

winter campaign. And then--do you have a question?

R: What do you mean by "campaign"?

HH: Oh, it's the time the sugar factory starts until they, get all the beets milled.

They call that a campaign. Most of them, they start in October, you know, right

after beet harvest gets underway. At that time, they started

in September, hand labor they started a little earlier. But they would be

milling beets, probably, the Longmont factory had them shut down along until

about the 10th or 12th of February. You see, and that's . . .

R: So right through the winter season, fall and winter season.

HH: Right. It's what they called a campaign. I guess they still do, some of them. I

don't know.

R: So your father really came to Colorado, then, as one of the beet workers, and

right to Loveland.

HH: He came over here as a farmhand, I would imagine at first. He worked for this

farmer that feeding a lot of sheep and cattle, I understand, and then when the

mill opened then, why he'd work in the factory eight hours, then when he got off

there, why, he'd put in another five, six, or seven hours feeding stock out

there, hauling this pulp he was talking about from the mill out to feed, and I

don't know when he slept, but I never did ask. If he was then like when I knew

him, he didn't.

R: He didn't do it at all.

HH: Yeah, he was the last one to bed at night, and in the morning he'd wake up, and

it was still just. getting daylight, and he was already out again, I don't know.

R: You're making a distinction here. I think. I mean, your father, then, was

working with sheep and with cattle and so on this farm, and then in the beet

factory

HH: He never was considered a regular beet worker in the fields.

R: That's what I meant. Uh-huh.

HH: He never did. Because I was just getting to that. When he, then in 1915, after he put through that winter campaign and everything, that Spring he went

to farming. He rented a place, he bought himself a team of horses, he was

on his own, from then on. His wife and his kids worked a lot of beets, but he

never did.

R: I see (laughing), that was division of labor.

HH: You get what I'm talking about.

R: Yes.

HH: He was doing the rest of the farming, and then my mother and us kids, we dug in

the beets, and a little hand labor in the fields like that, and he even went so

far as if he wasn't busy on his own farm, he'd work for the neighbors, like

stacking hay or threshing crew or something like that, you know, but he didn't

like to work beets too well. That was women's work.

R: That was women's work.

HH: That was women's work.

(End of first tape, beginning of second)

R: Okay, Mr. Henkel, you were speaking about your father.

HH: Yeah, and like I started to say, in 1915 he started farming. He rented a small

place, borrowed some money to buy a team of horses and what little equipment he

needed, he was on his own from then on.

R: Was this here near Loveland?

HH: Loveland, right about a half a mile north of the Campion School. Where the

Seventh-Day Adventist high school is, they say, on the old cement road that

used to go down by it. I don't know what high school it was at that time. Part

of 287, I would imagine now, would be, if it was still there and they farmed

there for two years, and then is when he they came to Longmont, and then farmed

here in 1917 and '18. That was during the War.

R: During the war.

HH: War years. The epidemic, the wife talked about, we had it, too. And . . .

R: Much illness in your family as well?

HH: Yes, They were all down except one or two. It seemed like they always managed

one of them to stay on their feet until somebody else recovered, and then they

took over, but that's the way they got by, I mean, then Mom, of course, she had to get up and hold on to the wall or

take a chair to get across the room. She had to do the cooking, z if there was

anything left to cook, and they got by. We had, well, my one brother and my one

sister had severe, oh, what would you call it, after the flu, later on, they

didn't know it at the time, but later on in years, why, it came to the surface

they both had kidney problems.

R: Oh,yes,

HH: Due to the severity of the flu at that time. And they both died young.

R: How many were in your family?

HH: Ten. Ten children, and then the parents.

R: And eight of them lived to grow up, then.

HH: Well, they all were mature age, yeah, the youngest one, I think, [inaudible]

was twenty-eight, and my sister that died young, she was about 34, and then I

had an older brother that died just before World War II, in 1940. He was 39,

just, well, just a few days short of being 40 years old, and my other brother,

he was born in 1914, and he died in 1965. So they all, I mean, the youngest

one was 28.

R: Okay. Why don't you go ahead with some of what you've written here?

HH: There just isn't too much to talk about here in Longmont and Loveland, because

I just don't remember much here, it’s like her. When we moved to Brighton,

over there, that’s when things start, I was five years old, going on six, and

that move, from then on I can remember just about everything, you might say,

what took place. I was involved in livestock, in working, went along when they

was out in the fields.

R: This was a farm? Near Brighton?

HH: Yeah. He bought it. He bought the place over there.

R: And that would have been what year?

HH: 1919.

R: 1919.

HH: Yeah, see, he started farming in 1914, and by 1919, he owned a farm.

R: That's very good. So he did all right with his farming during the renting days. HH: By 1922, he bought another one. He had two of them, then.

R: Adjacent, or . . .

HH: Yeah, right close. It was within daily traveling, you know, you’d go and come

back and forth to ...But he was progressive, and of course, he had these two

older boys, they were older than I am, and my older, my sister that was older

than I. I mean, they helped a lot, we milked cows all the time, and we fed

cattle all winter, this was constant, you know what I mean, and we had the labor

house on the place that was a family in that the year around, he kept that man

busy. And then during the peak season of the harvest or planting, why, he had

extra hired help, that we kept right in the house. Board and room.

R: Would they have been German?

HH: Well, most of them were German background. Or yeah, we had, some, I don't

know what they were. They come from out of state. They just come bumming down the

road, you know, they wanted a meal or to work a day or two for a meal, you know,

he'd put them to work. He didn't let anybody get away if he wanted to work. I

don't care if you had to dig a hole and cover it up. Really, he was just that

way, you know. No, they just generally from all walks of life. Mostly, I would

say that they were from the German background, because he didn't speak German, I

mean English, too well at that time, of course, he never did really learn it,

and, but . . .

R: Did, you all spoke German, then, in your home as you were growing up?

HH: Right, right, yeah. When we talked to the folks it was German, and then when we’d

get outside or we'd go to school, well, we spoke English. The kids all learned

English in school, right away, like she said, we went to school, and was the

first thing I learned was how to talk, and read and write, and, but he was a

progressive type of person, to just kind of point out what I'm talking about

here, he, like I said, a while ago, in 1922, he bought a truck, because he was

milking cows and they were having trouble getting the milk into town, which was

six and a half miles away to the dairy to sell, so he went and bought a truck to

haul that milk to town. And then he picked up all the neighbors' milk. He charged for hauling, see. And this was one of the sidelines that he got H into right away. The other thing is, in, about 1922 or '23, you know, he

already owned a tractor. It was worthless, but he had it.

R: (Laughing) You speak as though you had to help repair it.

HH: No, later on I had to drive it. I didn't at that time when he bought it. My

older brother was the one that drove it, but, I mean, he was always ready

to go forward, you know what I mean. He didn't condemn any of the new ideas, so

to speak.

R: Uh-huh. Would that have been unusual, . . . among the German farmers, generally

that early?

HH: Among most farmers.

R: Most farmers.

HH: The whole area out there, there was only people that I knew of that had tractors

that early were out in the wheatland, the drYland, the big steamers and things

of that nature, you know. Most of them, they just had small place and done all

the work with horses and by hand, you know, and, but, then by 1930 he bought the

farm in 1919, 1930 he put up a new house, which is still there, we lived in it

while we was out there, we farmed there 20-some years after he retired. It's

still there, and that was the first house in the whole community that had inside

plumbing and electric lights.

R: Is that right? Uh-huh. Now, you say in the community. Do you mean in the rural

area?

HH: In the rural area, around there, yeah.

R: In Brighton.

HH: In that particular community that we lived out in there.

R: Could you tell me how to get to the farm, or what the directions would be? It's

six and a half miles, you say, northeast of Brighton?

HH: Well, you can go two ways. You can go straight east of Fort Lupton on 52 five

miles and then go four miles south, or if you get to Brighton, you go straight

east of the sugar factory to where that trailer town is out there, and next to

the freeway there, 76, and that's a mile and a half north of that. And that's oil

road through there now.

R: Okay. One of the reasons I asked that is that we're also trying to take some

slides, and we have some pictures of some of the German-Russian houses in

different towns, but we don't have many with farms.

HH: I wouldn't recommend going out and taking a picture now, because it don't look

like nothing, not the way it did. This is heartbreaking to go out there and

what it looked like...just...

KH: Yeah, it breaks your heart . . .

HH: Four or five years ago when we left there. It had a picket fence, a white,

painted fence around it, they tore all that down, that's all demolished and

grown into weeds. Last year we was out there, we had an awful fight with that

character about the weeds in the yard and . . .

R: You know, there's an old story about, "You can't go home again." And I'm afraid

that's true with all of us.

HH: Yeah, and then in 1931, up to 34 is when that Depression and that terrible

drought was. Well, irrigation water got so short that in 1934 he went ahead and

went into debt and drove four wells on that one place up there. This was

another first. Irrigation wells. To get water to water the crops.

R: Did he strike water?

HH: Yeah. Not too much, but it really helped. Then he was, another one of his firsts

was land leveling. You had a field, you know, some of them you had to irrigate

from several directions to short rows and stuff, he went and hired some guy with

one of these big Cats with a carry-all. . .

R: Yes, to smooth and shape the land for you. So that the water would flow.

HH: All flowed one way. This increased his production and I mean, over just a short

period of years, it paid for itself. Saved on water and increased production.

R: Yeah. That's expensive business, when you do that kind of land improvement.

HH: And he was one of the first guys on the REA line, then in, what was it, about

1942, was when they bought the, what they called the, uh, Three-Phase Power through there, and then, by that time, he had, one, two, three, four, I think

four or five wells on these four farms that he had by that time. And he put

electric motors on all of them and he got away, see, we were running these with

gas, and we had a lot of trouble with them old engines that, seemed like you'd

start them and get going, and you'd go somewhere, when you’d come back, that

thing had died on you. Wasn’t pumping water, so, well, I mean...you was

interested, last time I talked to you, was interested in what these people

contributed.

R: Right.

HH: This is the reason I'm putting this out. I'm not trying to brag about him but I

mean, if you're interested in what they contributed to the community, or to

state or to the country, these are just some of the highlights that he did

accomplish.

R: This is marvelous, and it really sounds, well, I would say, exceptional.

Wouldn't you say, that he was one of the front runners in that particular

community?

HH: Well, yeah, and they, the most ironic thing about it is he couldn't read or

write a word of English.

R: Is that right? So he remained with the German language for . . .

HH: Well, he never did get any schooling, see. In English. He could talk, he could

talk, broken, you could tell he had a brogue and all this and that, but when

he, got a document, he couldn't read it, or a contract, he had to go to

a lawyer or somebody else had to read it for him, but he signed his name in

German. He never did get to where he learned his, to write his name in English.

It was always in German. He says, "I don't have to worry about anybody forging

any of my checks."

R: That's right, yeah. So he used the German script.

HH: Right.

R: Uh-huh. Okay.

K: It was beautiful.

HH: So this kind of a, a run-through on this. Now I don't know if you have any

questions, it would help if you'd ask questions, I mean...

R: Right. Well, what, I mean, as you remember growing up on these farms, yeah, what do you look back as sort of what you enjoyed most, or what do you remember best

as you think back, sort of unique experiences that you had?

HH: Well, I don't know, its kind of hard to explain it. At the time, as it happened,

I thought we were being abused, but now that we're grown a adults and see

what's going on, we appreciate what we learned on the farm.

R: Yeah. Now what do you mean by being abused? You meant there was hard work...

HH: Hard work all the time. No recreation, see. But now we bought and inherited

part of the farm which helped us financially a whole lot, and we have never

shied away from work, even today she goes down there. She don't have to serve

lunch at school if she don't want to, I don't have to do janitor work if I

don't want to, but I do it to keep busy, otherwise we go stir-crazy; you know.

Most people, a lot of them, I know a lot of people my age, that have quit, they

go to the beer joint. And that don't help them.

R: No. You go downhill fast.

HH: That's right. And we stayed with the church. This is the other thing that we

appreciate that we were raised and brought up in church life.

R: Was this the church in Brighton, or was it a rural church?

HH: No, this was in town.

R: Which one would this have been?

HH: We went to the Evangelical Lutheran, there in Brighton, until about 1930

something, and then we started going to the Congregational Church. A lot of the

people from the cities, here's my confirmation certificate.

R: Oh, yes. Brighton, Colorado. Evangelical, [inaudible]. Gee, these are handsome

certificates. Born the 27th day of August, 1912, confirmed the first of April

1928, uh-huh.

KH:, Here’s another one. I'm gonna interrupt you just a little bit there. I was

confirmed, and this was the Evangelical Lutheran, see, in Longmont, but the

stamp is something very unique [inaudible] which means, that’s when the church

was founded in 1916. Any of these other stamps that don't have them, just, I

just can't understand it, and today you don't find them anymore. These gold seals. You

understand what I mean?

R: Yes, yes I do.

KH: And, like . . .

R: This is the Evangelical Zion’s Church in Longmont?

KH: In Longmont. Lutheran.

R: And there’s a Zion’s Lutheran Church in Brighton, too. Is there not?

KH . Well, yes, yes.

HH: Missouri Synod.

KH: Missouri Synod.

R: I see. This was this one.

KH: These were German.

HH: This one here, they referred to this as the Ohio Synod, Evangelical Lutheran.

KH: But these are ruined because they were put into these round cylinders, and that,

we had to go out and get them and look at them every so often, but as far as

reading this is concerned, I'll read every inch of it for you. That's just how

[inaudible], that means my verse that I'm supposed to remember, see that would

be [inaudible] that’s in Psalms 111:10. In other words, it’s “The fear of the

Lord is a wise thing, "is the way I understand it. And it's a smart way of

getting to that place where you want to be relieved of all this hard.”

R: Pain and suffering down here.

KH: Pain and suffering in life, yes. That's about what it means. But, every once in

a while I have to get it out to read it again, or I'll forget it. It's a

reminder, but these are some, but I think that this one here is one of the most

beautiful. Some of them are having pictures taken of theirs, so that all of

their children can have one, and they, they photograph beautifully.

R: Yes, I'm sure.

KH: But you don't see any more of those. R: Well, no, the certificates that I'm aware of are not elaborate like that at

all.

KH: Aren't they? But the faith now, you may say Lutheran, but it's Evangelical

Lutheran.

R: Okay.

KH: Yet there's a distinct difference between that, isn't there, Harold?

HH: Not too much.

KH: Well, in my communion part, it was. Because it was what they called a

Reformed Evangelical Lutheran. Now what they had out there in that country

about that, that I can't even explain to you, why that was called Reform,

because it was a difference in, the bread that you took, it wasn't the wafer,

and it was strictly the wine and so on, but I can remember my mother and dad

helping build four churches, and I think yours did, too, didn't they, Harold?

H: Well, they moved around, you know.

KH: They moved around, and then there'd have to be, there wasn't a church, and

there'd have to be another church built, and I noticed some of your questions

here on the last.

R: Yes.

HH: Any other questions up to where I've been? So far?

R: Well, both of you really are stressing the importance of the church in your

lives and the faith and your parents stressed this, and . . .

KH: And the faith. A faith to live by.

R: And this was true for both of you.

KH: But that wasn't, we weren't the only ones, now don't get us wrong. That

over there, that was the middle of the Catholics that way, that was among the

Mennonites, they were very, very strong in what they taught their children,

and you can still see it to this day. .To this day you can still see it

in this generation. Now what's going to happen in the next generation, that

I’m not going to speak for, I don’t know. But they're going to be a strong-

-it's beginning to show in our young people. But how far they're going to be

able to carry it, I really don't know.

R: Well, now, as after you were married--when did you get married?

KH: During the War. Second World War.

R: Do you remember the year?

HH: January 30, 1942.

R: '42. And then, I assume, that you continued to raise your own children in the

church.

KH: Right.

R: Yeah, okay. You perpetuated this, as you were, as you in your family was growing

up, so well.

KH: Oh, yes.

HH: That's what I say, this is why we appreciate now, what we thought at one time

was abuse, this you see.

R: Yes, okay, no, I understand that.

HH: Our children, all three of them, they were baptized and baptist (?)

certificates, they went to confirmation school, and we went so far as to send

them through Christian Day School at Brighton at that Lutheran Church. They've

got eight grades of schooling in the parochial school there. They taught

religion every

day of the school week.

KH: As well as the . . .

HH: Besides all the other topics which were mandatory by the state.

R: Surely. Now, was that something of a German school? Or did your children learn

the German language?

HH. No, It was originally, but no.

KH: No, not this late. But it was earlier.

HH: The earlier part of that church was German, but they converted to English like

all the others did.

R: Uh-huh, okay.

KH: We did give our young people a faith to live by. You understand, they can never

say “Well our mother and dad didn't teach us nothing about that,” like our

parents did us and their parents did them. Which, to me, is something that's very

important and then, of course our parents, that was the reason they came to

the United States, was the religion and the land. That's what they wanted.

They wanted that freedom. That freedom of religion and the freedom to work and

I can still hear my mother say, she says, "I do not want to go back to Russia.

I would like to take a look at it once more before I go and leave this earth,

but I do not want to, go back," she said. “We've had our freedom here," she

says, and I've got the proof here. They got their citizenship papers they

wanted. But she says, "Don't ever forget," she says, "we went through some

hellish days over there, too." Hard work. Very hard work, and the, they were

stoop labor. They dirty, well, we were the dirty Russians here.

R: [inaudible], I mean, these are some things, too, to talk about. Now did, are

you familiar with these terms?

KH: Oh, you bet. I was called that every day that I went to school.

R: Now in the Wiley area? In the Longmont area?

KH: Wiley area and here, too.

R: Both places.

KH: Both places. Yes, and they were very, and some of the children were very nasty

about the children of the well I would say, the immigrant children. That brought

home-made things in their lunch pails.

R: Oh. You mean food.

KH: Food. Yes. It was home-made.

R: As opposed to American, no-good white bread?

KH: Yeah, you've got the drift (laughing).

R: You both smile at that.

HM: We eat it every day now.

KH: Yes, now, and like I say, it was nothing to them to ruin our lunches for us,

drop a handful of gravel or something in it. So we couldn't eat it.

R: Well, that's downright mean. k

KH: They were downright mean and nasty in some of those places in Wiley. And

when I got a little bigger, here, I put up some pretty good scraps. Which

we had a right to do. You know. And now, it just happened to me there last

Friday, a young man walked into the kitchen and said, "Which one of you

ladies wants to teach us how to bake bread?" And not one hand went up.

(Laughing) “How many students?” “Thirty” “Are you kidding?” is what one of

them gals said. And this place here, this isn't near big enough. And they

want to learn so bad now.

R: Isn't it interesting how it sort of goes in cycles?

KH: It's very interesting how this thing goes in cycles. Yeah. And we're also,

some of those people that came over the [Eber the Volga?]

R: You have heard that story, too?

KH: Oh, we know all about it, I've got three copies of that.

R: In a sense, from [inaudible]? All right, but did your family ever use that

phrase?

KH: Oh yes. [inaudible] ? Oh, yes.[inaudible]. Over there, over the river, on

the other side.

R: Okay. And that's where they said they came from.

HH: Well, they used that expression, but they didn't come from there. They came

from the hilly side [inaudible].

KH: From this side, the hilly side. They didn't come from the river side, yeah.

R: [inaudible]. Okay. Is Kolb on the [inaudible], too?

HH: Kolb, oh yeah. It's hilly country. It’s not really mountains, but it's

hilly. Rougher country than the meadow side.

KH: Did Harold say that we have not heard from our people out there since 19,

what is it, '32? During the Depression years, nothing. Not a word I have got

and we were the only family from my side that got in here. The only ones.

R: That got in here.

KH: Right. Into the United States. The rest are all out there.

R: I see. In Russia, you mean. But your parents did correspond until the early

thirties? KH: Until the revolution started over there. That's when everything stopped.

R: I see. Henk

HH: The revolution was in '17 and '18. But this was, but there were, during the

Depression, and . . .

KH: During the Depression, that's when we got the last letter.

HH: They had a famine out there too, at the same time, but this was when Stalin's era

took over. That's when all this stopped, this corresponding back and forth, my

folks would say, I think about ‘28, ‘29, somewhere along in there.

KH: They didn't get no more letters, either, did they?

R: But you did, both of your families did correspond till the thirties?

HH: They were telling me for quite a few years there, toward last, they, you know,

they'd, they had a way of doing it, but the message was not to send too much more

money because they didn't get it anyway. So this just kind of dried up, and they

finally got the word, you know, that Grandma or Grandpa had died, it just, pretty

soon nothing no more, they'd write, no more answer, nothing.

KH: Grandma starved to death. It was the last letter I can remember, the last

letter, my dad wouldn’t keep it, he said. "Because I don't want my children to

have to read this over and over and know that all I had done, sent her money and

food stuffs, and clothing, that she wouldn't have had to starve." But she did.

She starved. So that, and I noticed you had a question here about, "Did you

serve in the military?" What country are you talking about? Here or over there?

R: Oh. Well, this, I was wondering, so often, we're told, that some of the original

immigrants came from Russia because they did not want to serve in the Czar's

military.

KH: That's right, yes.

R: And so, a number of people, of course, did. And then decided they would leave

before they were called up again for the Russo-Japanese War, or something of this

nature. Did your parents say anything about that?

KH: Well, yes, that's why they left, too. They did say that they would not serve

under the, in the military, because Katherine the Great had given them that, that right, that they don’t have to. And they were goin to stay with it if

it was at all possible. My dad had said he would not serve because of that H manifesto that she had given those people.

R: He did not serve, then, at all?

KH: Not to my knowledge. He got out before it come to his turn, I guess he was

pretty young yet at that time. Now, although I think they had probably already

had him on the list, but this is the reason I have much trouble getting that

thing from - - -

R: That time period.

KH: That time period, that’s lost, I cannot, and I probably can get it, if I get

enough time to work at it with some people from South America. That’s the only

way I would be able to find it. But I saw some of those questions here.

R. Yes, I noticed you were writing some things down, so I wanted to give you some

time to respond.

KH: And as far as stoop labor, I didn't call it that. I never did call it that as

long as we farmed for ourselves, so we were doing our own work, whether that

was, we were stooped all day, I would say, yes, we worked 14, 16, 18 hours, but,

oh, that was our own work. We didn't have to do it. But when they mention

today about how hard some of these people work in the fields, that don't set too

good with me.

R: Because it's not as hard as it used to be.

KH: No. It's not hard at all. This one.

R: Um-hmm, they don't know what work is.

KH: I'm afraid not. And as far as that goes, I am quite concerned about some of our

own young people of today that are growing up, not so much ours, they're already

up there in the thirties and, well over twenty-five, they have, they had gotten

part of that already, they know what had happened out there. It's their

children. That are, growing up.

R: Your, grandchildren' s generation.

KH: Yes, and as far as our children are concerned, we did everything in the world

to, give them an education. We had to give up a lot to do that. Made sure that if one of them didn't get clear through college, it wasn't our fault. In other

words, . . .

R: You and your husband saw to it that they . . .

KH: They got educated.

R: You worked so they could get educated.

KH: Uh-huh.

R: Now there are three children. As I recall, two boys and a girl?

KH: Yeah, and the boys were twins.

R: Twins. Ah-hah. And what have they become? The boys are in Texas, I think?

KH: One is a controller in an office.

HH: He’s the head of the accounting department with Coastal States Oil Company.

R: I see.

HH: But it’s the division that is involved in this coal gasefication program. They've

got a big coal mine running here in Utah, and fertilizer plant in Cheyenne, and

this is the division that he is the head accountant.

R: I see.

HH: I mean, they call them controllers, because . . .

KH: He has so many people under him.

HH: I don't know how many he has working under him, but he answers to the big guy

upstairs for all the money that's spent, the expenses.

R: Lots of responsibility there.

KH: Yes, he has, yes.

HH: You might add that he went to school, he has a CPA now. He just got it in

November, I think, or December.

KH: And then Jim, and Jim . . .

HH: Well, he's a technician with IBM. He's been with them for eight or nine years

now. What he does, he, I don't know, he tells us, you know, he works on business

machines, computers, and all this type of thing.

KH: It's mostly classified, he may never really go into it with us, and we don't

ask him. It's pretty much like and they have both served their country, they have both given four years of their lives to the United States. Harold has given

four, what with the four years, four and a half years in the Second World War, so

as far as that goes, I think we like our country pretty well here. And as far as

my family is concerned, I have a pretty good record made up with a couple of

mistakes yet, this is what I've done so far. I want it in the worst way, but

there are a few mistakes yet that have to be corrected.

Rt. The genealogical information.

KH: Yes, and if you noticed, here, I did not tell you, because I don't care too much

how many of them have passed away, you can read it over here. All of the boys

have. gone but the one. And one sister is gone, out of the ten children. There

were twelve children, really, no, let's see, Pete and Henry, we have to count,

but these are the ones that, what have I got here, yes, that's all of them. How

many were there? Twelve.

R: Yes, you have twelve there.

KH: Twelve children

R: Now, interestingly, well, no, some of the girls' names, you can't exactly say

they're German names as such, but the fellows' names here are all Anglicized. He

wasn't Heinrich, he was Henry. Is that right?

KH: Well, that happened in America.

R: This happened in America.

KH: That's why I had such a time putting that young man's record on that Russian

paper, because he came from Russia. He was called Henry, but it's really Heinrich

because one of his uncles, his grandpa's name was Heinrich, see. If you'll

notice this paper right here, where I've been working. Now, Dad was not the

oldest son. He was, you can pick that out right quick-like. See here? As you .go

on? See?

R: Uh-hmm, right.

KH: But, that's as far as I can get information, and I just can't get it.

R: Well, this is difficult, isn't it?

KH: Yes, it' s very difficult. Well, they won't give it to us, so why, why, what can

I do here? But I still have five generations here. See, yeah. R: Right. Well, on that note, let me ask here, just looking at names here, and going

along here, is "Harold” German? Where does your name come from?

HH: I don't know. See, here's the given name right here.

R: Oh, Reinhold.

KH: Um-hmm, that's German.

HH: What happened, on the way, I don't know. As long as I can remember, I've been

known as Harold.

R: Uh-huh, okay. You didn't choose your own name?

HH: No, not really, I mean, this is where these interpreters and school records get

wires crossed.

R: This is what we run into so often when we're dealing with immigrant families

in particular, that the clerk didn't understand the name, and just wrote down any

old name.

HH: All ray military records and all my other records, Social Security and

everything, all my deeds of property and things I own, I always used Harold, I

always use that name.

R: Surely. Harold, is you. And that's what it is.

KH: Well, you just stop and read, "Rheinhold" And you try and interpret that once,

I've never been able to interpret that.

R: Well, I mean, it's very definitely a German name, but I've seen sometimes

references to "Rennie." Something like that.

KH: Reinie.

R: Or Reinie. Yeah.

KH: But what is Reinie?

HH: When I was a little guy, you know, the other kids would call me that. Then after

we grew up, why, that just disappeared completely after I, got out of school, and

everything I ever done and everything I ever owned, all the documents are all

signed Harold.

KH: In this here . . . HH: You notice on my confirmation, it says Harold. Now this same guy, that same

preacher, is the on that translated this from here. He's the one that made that

translation. Now why he used Harold up there and on this paper, this is the

original, from the old country, and this is me, right here on the bottom of the

[inaudible], the fifth see.

R: [inaudible]

HH: See, here's another peculiar thing. On my mother's maiden name, middle name,

was Maria, spelled r-i-a, and then my sister's r-i-e. You see.

R: Hmm. Its hard to explain things.

HH: I ain' t gonna try.

R: Okay.

HH: I ain' t even, gonna try.

KH: Now, if you, the reason I made this Henry, was because these are, gonna go to

my children, and to maybe some of my sisters. Now I wrote my name as Katherine,

again, it was the schoolteacher. My real name is Katerina. Or Katrina.

And Marie was German. [inaudible], her name is not really quite like that

on her baptismal certificate, it is Emilie. See? Pauline was the same, now Dan,

Daniel, they named him after Dan in the Bible, I remember that part, Emma,

that's the same thing. This in German is [inaudible]. His name is Wilmhelm.

R: Yes, that would make sense.

KH: So it's William in German, I mean, in English.

R: And Irene.

KH: And then we got quite English on the way down.

R: Well, you sort of, see, sort of, this is kind of what we're talking about. This

Americanization process has gone on, and you see that right here in the

families. KH: And then I remember ray dad distinctly saying that we came from the

Saxony area. Okay, when I met Susan, what was her name, from New York, Youngman,

yes, she said “Be sure that you put behind this, question mark-Hessen.” And she

said, too, she says the maps have changed so much, the countries have changed so

much, so I still haven't sent this in, because I've got to make corrections.

There's a mistake or two here in, where one of these girls was born, I finally got through to

her that she was born in Wiley, that she was not born in Lamar. I said, "You

were baptized in Lamar. You were born in Wiley." See, so I have to do some

corrections. But every time you go get another paper and you see one of these

documents, you've got something wrong here.

R: Find something else again.

KH: Something wrong there.

R: I know that. But it's so fine to have this kind of information.

KH: Yes, but I'd like to have it just corrected a little bit better yet. But if I

don' t get it corrected, why, I'm not going to de-4t worry about it.

R: Okay. All right. You know what, before we go any further, would you want to

read that poem that you liked so much, because this poem, you say, sort of

tells it the way it was.

KH: A new, generation had grown up around us, and what they’ve done would really

astound us. They've never read a book by a kerosene light, took a bath in a

washtub on a Saturday night.

They never went to a party where they played Wink 'Em, they never have heard

of Lady Pynkham.

Never wore a lace corset or g buttoned-up shoes, never drank near-beer or

bootlegged booze.

Never hitched up a horse or hand-milked a cow, pumped water by hand or

followed a plow.

Never wore suspenders to hold up their pants, never cranked a car to go to dance.

Never pulled taffy or rode on a train, never ran to the toilet in a pouring-down

rain.

Those days weren't all bad, I earnestly insist, but what will this generation

tell the next one it missed?

R: That's good. Where did you find that?

KH: I don't know, I just went through some things and I found that, and I thought,

"Good grief, if that doesn't talk about us." (Laughs) R: Right. And it's Harold Nesbit?

KH. Yes, you might have to use that.

R: Yeah, that's, good, yeah. That's. good, it's good to have something of that

nature.

KH: Yeah, I though it was real. good, and as far as clippings are concerned, oh,

I have to show you the picture of this toilet. Now this is the way they used

to have them when we were started.

R: Um-hmm, a log cabin one, really.

KH: Now, that's the one that we're talking about, they ain't never ran to a

toilet in a pouring-down rain. I did. In the middle of the night, a lot of

times.

R: That's the way it was.

KH: That's the way it was. And then I have so much more information that I have

yet to record. Boy.

R: Let me ask something else here. You've referred to citizenship papers. KH:

Oh, yeah.

R: Do you know when your parents applied for citizenship? Or what the date is,

or...

KH: Wait a minute. Let's see, "I declared my intention to become a citizen," wait

a minute, let’s get that straight, you help me on this a little bit. It's

recorded, our parents' citizenship papers are recorded in Greeley at the...

R: At the county seat.

KH: The county seat, yes. And the pictures of Mom and Dad are both on there. They

cannot be photographed, ever.

R: Is that right?

KH: Yes, there's a law against that. But that’s where . . .

R: Was this when they were at Fort Lupton or sometime? All right, that would

have been < <

HH: They lived out there, yeah, in Weld County. There's one of them, let's seem

this is Peter Rudi "I declared my intentions to become a citizen of the

United States of America on January 20,1941 in the district of Weld County,

Greeley, Colorado

KH: Where'd you find that? R: Inside page.

KH: Inside page?

R: Uh-huh.

HH: So that's the same date. They went together.

KH: Yeah, and that's, this here is Mom's. "I declared my intention to become a

citizen of the United States April the 30th, 1941, in the district court of Weld

County in Greeley, Colorado."

R: All right. You don't remember why, at that particular time?

KH: Well, yes, they had to go to school and learn, and they both went, and we'd

help them. I don't know whether I have the book anymore or not, that she

brought home and by that time I was already old enough to help her with her

reading and so she'd learn about the Constitution, the different things that

they needed to know. And that's why they waited that long, until we were able to

help them.

R: Okay. What about your parents?

HH: They never did become citizens.

R: They never did become? Either your mother or your father. Uh-huh.

HH: Because they had this difficulty with trying to learn the English language. And

. . .

R: Did that ever give them any problems. That you recall?

HH: Well, the only problem was, was this alien registration then, later, that came

into effect, which didn't bother much, we just filled out his card, and that's

all there was to it. He never did pay any social security, never did try to draw

any. He just was well enough off where he, you know . . .

R: Could take cafe of himself.

HH: Could take care of himself.

R: Very good. Yeah.

HH: But all of the rest of the kids are citizens.

R: Now what about you?

HH: Oh, yeah. R: You were born, though, in Russia, but you did not have to apply for citizenship?

HH: Well, I did have to fill out one of them. Got mine when I was in the military,

see, I was drafted.

R: Oh, okay.

HH: And then when we got ready to go overseas, why, they called in all the non-

citizens out of the unit, that I was in there, and we made our declaration right

in the courtroom, and we were granted our papers. I had started school prior to

that, before I was drafted, with my older brother, he was going after his

papers, in '38 or '39, somewhere in along there. We started to go to classes to

learn. Course, I'd been through grade school, I learned the history,

they wouldn't have had any difficulty, but, see, the way they done that at the

time they’d go into a class, and they'd go through that class, and then this

teacher, this instructor, would take this particular class right into the court

before the judge, and then he would more or less represent them, and do the

introducing and everything, and this was a lot easier for the people to get

their papers that way than if they went out on their own, you know, and tried

to. This way they were instructed and everything else.

R: Right, um-hmm.

KH: Like my mother and dad did, they had to go on their own.

HH: I think what happened during that time there, from all along about 1938 up to

about '41, I think a lot of the people seen what was happening, the way things

were developing in Germany, and this way, and I think what they wanted to do

there, was to tie themselves to this country in a legal sense, you know what I

mean. Through the citizenship. I don't know whether there was ever any danger

of any of them ever being deported for anything, unless they done something, you

know, espionage or something like that, which I don't think. But I think

this had something to do with it, I'm not sure. What their motives were, but

there seemed like a lot of them were going at that time. Right along in them

years. R: Right. Well, you don't remember any discrimination to speak of, then.

KH: During the war?

R: You would have been too young for the First World War, I assume, and the Second

. . . a whole different story.

HH: Yeah, we had a few squabbles like she was talking about in school, but being I

was a male, they didn't pick on me too much, course the girls, you know, they'd

pick on them. They couldn't fight back, so to speak.

R: Were there pigtails to pull or anything like that? KH: They'd dunk them in ink

and everything else.

HH: It depends on the area. See, they were renting and they were moving from one

community to the other, and we were permanent, see, we went in there in 1919, we

bought the farm, we lived there all this time, and the whole community around

there, the rural community was pretty near all German, and there were more

German kids in that rural school than any other nationality, so we really didn't

have much problem. But the kids would go to town, we didn't have no trouble.

R: Okay, in the Brighton area. There were a lot of Germans, a lot of Japanese, and

I guess a lot of Mexicans in the Brighton area.

HH: In town.

R: Yeah, were you aware of that . . .

KH: No.

R: Not in the rural area.

HH: Not in the area out where our school was. Now, if I'd have gone to high school,

I'd have probably run into a little more difficulty, but six and a half miles

away and no bus, and . . .

R: You did not go to high school, though?

HH: No. He was too busy with his farms, and so . . .

R: So you stayed right on the farm and helped.

HH: Right, till this war broke out, and then I was drafted.

R: Okay. R: Does, now on the farming, Mr. Henkel, was it beet farming, or was it

everything else?

HH: We raised grain, hay, corn, and even had some Japanese people in there living

in one of the houses, they grew vegetables--tomatoes and cabbage and head

lettuce, and things of that nature. And, of course, your sugar beets in them

days was your cash crop. You went to the bank to borrow a few bucks, one of

the first things they asked you was how many acres of beets you gonna have

and how many milk cows you got. You didn't ask anything else, you see.

R: That was the collateral.

HH: That was the collateral, see. Then they had their name on your check in the

fall, when you. got paid for the sugar company. Which was ridiculous. We used

to, we was just laughing a while ago, before you came, I still have my sixty-

six, forty-six, forty-seven, and forty-eight, and forty-nine statements from

the sugar company, was the first, I started farming in '46 when I got back

from the service, before we started farming. We was looking at it down, we

got paid for our beets, six dollars and something a ton. And the beet check

only was eleven hundred and some odd dollars. I said, "Yeah, I even had to go

to the landlord and divide with him."

R: Oh my goodness, uh-huh.

HH: Boy, I tell you, talk about scrimping. And getting by on, you talking about a

dollar was a dollar, we made that one reach.

KH: It did. It reached, too.

R: It was they were different times, weren't they? And money was different.

KH: Still, though, if you really come down to it, the time now, the prices that

they're, getting, the cost to. go down here and, get what you need, I don't

know, we were better off back there.

HH: Well, it’s completely out of balance.

KH: It's completely out of balance.

HH: Some of those crops are selling now, they're not getting hardly any more for

it than I did in them days. KH: And their expenses are so . . .

R: They have gone sky-high. Now, I mean, when you have regular farming activities,

you need lots of equipment. Machinery and all of that.

HH: You do now.

R: Did you need an awful lot on the beet farming, too? Or was it mostly manual

work?

HH: Manual work. Like I stated, we had a labor house, there was a family in it, .

year round, and then with the peak seasons, we had extra hired help. And he had

seven boys.

R: The hired men.

HH: No. Dad.

R: Oh, your father. Okay.

HH: There was seven of us boys, course, now, the two older ones married off early,

but there was still, yeah, the five, and we were all busy.

R: And that way, with the family enterprise, you could really make it successful,

then.

KH: Right.

HH: Well, I mean, everybody had to work, or you couldn't make it.

KH: Now, we were the exact opposite. There were seven boys, we were seven girls. And

five boys. And the girls worked around here, between forty and sixty acres of

beets a summer, just stop and figure out what that would have cost to have

somebody come in and do that.

R: Yeah. Yeah. You couldn't pay hired to help to come do that kind of thing.

KH: No. Um-mmm. And the work we done. There was no weeds in the beets.

R: And this, I presume, really made family ties quite close.

KH: Very close.

R: Now we don't know whether, there are always, I suppose, some squabbles between a

brother and brothers and sisters and sisters, but nonetheless, the family unity

was there.

KH: We were just talking about it Saturday night to our daughter. She, and, they

still call me the slave-driver. That's how close the ties are (laughing). R: ,, Okay, all right.

KH: I got the orders from Dad...

R: You remember that book that you didn't like. But this was sort of a

portrait of the father there. He made everybody work.

KH: But you see, in our case, it was a little bit different. Dad would say to

me, "You be sure that you've got the girls out by six o'clock tomorrow

morning." That included the milking first, the chores, the breakfast, and

then get out and get started. And he says, "And you're not to leave the

field until seven tomorrow night. Unless something happens." I took the

lead with the hoe. And they had to haul. Well, there were three tools.

The hoe, in the spring, the chopping knife, in the fall. That's about what

we had, wasn't it, Harold? Two pieces of tools.

R: That's the machinery.

KH: That was the machinery.

HH: And a shovel.

KH: And we didn't just hoe the beets. We hoed the corn, we helped stack the

hay, we shocked the grain. That was all included, that's why I have sent so

many of these pictures.

HH: Sometime when you got time, if you ever come down this way again, I have a

reel of movie film down here that I started taking in 1950 of our farm

operation and our kids when they were only that big up until when we left

the farm. That's interesting to look at.

R: I betcha.

HH: I remember when we first started taking pictures, and then as we

progressed, you know, toward last, why, everything was mechanical and . . .

R: Um-hmm, you really saw the change.

HH: You can really see the change here.

KH: But don't get me wrong. I was tickled to death when they got that machine

that would top those beets. (Laughing)

R: (Laughing) Okay, I can understand that. KH: I'm not gonna gripe about that progress that they made. I'm telling you, that

was one of the nicest things that ever happened, although I could still, when

Harold would start topping with the topper, I would have to go out and get a

whiff of that cut beet, I'd be out with him most every afternoon, picking up

the beets and stuff, I’d just love the smell of that. That earth dug up, you

know, and that beet, there's just something about that aroma that's just, I

just loved. It's that way in the spring, too, when the neighbors, when they

start to plow, I just love the smell of that. There's just something about it.

HH: We was up at a funeral here just this past week. When was that? Thursday?

KH: Thursday when Pete died?

HH: Yeah. A whole bunch of us sat around there and then we got to talking. One

fellow there, he's a school teacher, and somehow somebody made the remark about

“the .good old days” He jumped on him right away, you know, he said, "What do

you mean by good old days?" "Why," he says, "back then, when, you know, when

they done this this way and that that way," and he looked at me, and he says,

"You're along in years. Would you go back to them good old days?" I says,

"No. I don't have to, go through all that again." "Well," he says, "then

what is he talking about that's so good about them good old days?" I says,

"Well, I don't know," I says, "There was a lot of hard work and everything was

primitive at the time," I said, "They done the best they could with what they

had," but I says, "The way things are, going now, the only thing that I would

like to see come back into play in the good old days that he was talking about

is the respect people had for each other and for the law, and not infringe on

somebody else's rights the way they do these days. "If you know what I mean.

R: Yes.

HH: I says, "That's the only thing that I'd like to see from the, good old days

come back, but that work and all that other," I says, "forget it."

R: (Laughing) Too much of that. Yes, uh-huh.

KH: He's, quite a good instructor, too. He's part of the relation, and we were

sitting across the table from him, and they were having quite a time with us. This, well, his wife especially, she says, "Now how in the world," she says,

"does that happen that they lose so many animals during .a storm like that?"

She had never known that when a blizzard like that comes and the animals are

even under a shed or someplace, that their air can get cut off, that they

can't breathe no more, that they suffocate. She says, "Well, what, how do you

save them?" Well I says, "You have to, get out, you have to clean them out."

She didn't know that, see, and I said, "You didn't know that? That they would

actually smother to death in a storm like that?" She said, "No, I thought

that they just all froze to death." Well, I says that it wasn't cold, I says,

"They have a pretty good coat on. “ I said, "They just actually, their

noses," I said, "They would just actually completely fill up with snow, and

dirt, and ice and an animal won't open their mouth and breathe." And she says,

"I never knew that." And I says, "My word, lady, where have you been all these

years when this happens out in these areas?"

R: But all of these city people, like me, don't know these things.

HH: When they're out in the rains like that, they drift with the storm, they drift

into a gully or a ditch, up against the fence, and they trample each other to

death, because they always want their back to the storm. They won't face the

storm.

KH : They'll never face it.

R: Uh-huh. You had cattle, then?

HH: Oh yeah, we had cattle.

KH: They'd, go out at night and clean them up.

R: Now, even along these lines, does it do any good to bring them into the

corrals? Or will they just go through the corrals in the storm?

KH: No.

HH: No, they'll stay in the corrals, but what she's talking about, the way that

wind was blowing, that fine snow, they just can't breathe, it. gets in their

nostrils and it just freezes them solid and dirt, too, flying, you know, and

they just keep breathing till that nostril just plugs completely up, and then they just, there's nothing you can do.

R: It goes into their nostrils and they have water in the lungs, too?

KH: Same thing. Get pneumonia.

HH: The best thing if they could get to water, they dunk their nose in water, see,

and they, get it over their tongue, and they blow, you know, they can blow

that out, but if they can't get to water, see, it just freezes. If they can

get to water, that thaws that ice, you see, and then they can get it out. But

it, an animal is better off in shelter or in the corral when the storm like

that than be out on the range, because you can get to them as soon as the

storm is over. But if they get out, they're probably miles away. You don't

know where they're at till you find them, you know, it's almost too late.

R: And in that driving, drifting, snow and wind, why, you'd get lost out there,

too.

HH: Yeah, you can't see. Can't see ahead of you.

KH: There was something that happened. I'm going back to Wiley again. This

happened during my childhood days, too, one morning, we saw these clouds

coming, and the storm, this is bad in the south, you know. In the southern

part of the state. And my mother said that morning, “The little ones are all

to stay home Just the two oldest girls can go”, and that was my sister Mary

and I. We got on the bus and we got to school, and we had a young man from

the neighborhood driving the bus, and it didn't take but, I would say, maybe

fifteen, twenty minutes, when the word came down from the principal, saying,

"Load the buses, get the kids home!" And fast!" They didn't hardly, and the

teachers even helped us get our boots on, and everything, you know, to get us

out of the building. Well, as we got from Wiley, if you know Wiley, you drive

north, that highway, I'm talking about that highway. At that time it was just

a little old measly dirt road. Well we started north, and finally he had to

put two boys on the fenders to keep the windshield clean, so he could see

where he was going. This thing was coming in so fast, and instead of. going

and delivering, he was, I don't know, I think of it now, he should have

delivered the children closer to the school first, but he started out toward that prairie and that ditch. That Fort Line Canal.

Well, he got as far as to where his parents lived, which were, there was

quite a lane, I would say, a fourth of a mile in, at that time there were

a lot of lanes. Well, the young man, I have to admire the spunk he had,

and he turned that bus in toward that lane, and got stuck. There was

already a drift there, just think, in that short of a time, so he sat

there for ten minutes, that's all he did, he just sat there. And he

watched that storm. He could see the fenceposts on both sides, so he

turned around and he said to all the children, now he says, "I want you

all to get out of the bus," and he says, "I want you to go between these

posts here," he sent us up that lane, and some of us bigger ones took

some, you know, by the hands, we couldn't get them all, and here was this

little one, for some reason one of the, girls couldn't drag her, and we

got into this farmhouse, and then he left the bus ten minutes later to

pick up this little girl lying already on the other side of the post. In

the storm. And then he took her and carried her home, and checked,

counted noses, to make sure that he had all of those children in. Well,

we were lucky enough that we had a roof over our heads and none of the

parents knew where we were. None of them. The telephone lines were down,

everything broke, but somehow they got word, I don't know how it

happened, where we were at, but how in the world those people fed all

those children, you wouldn't believe what those people put out. Then they

had to come with wagon and horses, but ahead of this storm another one

came, and that was when they had, I don't even know whether you'll

remember it. I don't think so. That was when that busload of children

froze down there. They did the same thing. That fellow drove into that

miserable storm over into that area between Wiley and Eads, you know,

where that highway is? Well, he got across that big ditch, which was the

Fort Lyon Canal.

R: How do you spell that?

KH: Lyon? It's L-y-o-n, isn't it?

HH: No, it's F-o-r-t- L- i -n-e. R: Oh, okay.

KH: L- i -n-e?

R: One word or two?

KH: No, it's Fort Line. I'd have to look it up on the map.

HH: I think it's just Fort Line.

KH: But it's the ditch that when you come in from Eads, and there's the ditch and

then there's the irrigated area on the other side, it's the wheat field, now,

which, at that time there wasn't any there. And that fellow drove over there

into that area with that busload of kids, and they all froze to death but one

of them.

R: Um, that's bad.

KH: That happened, I tell you that was a long time till those people got over that.

R: Yeah, I remember that school bus accident that happened up here in the mountain

pass a few years ago.

KH: Yeah, mountain pass, yeah. ,

HH: This, what she was talking about, this is history.

KH: That's three years, but, I mean, that was three days and three nights that storm

went on.

HH: That happened in, sometime in March in 1930.

KH: '30, and he left the bus. Didn't he?

R: You mean the driver?

KH: The driver left the bus, and he . . .

HH: He was trying to get to help.

KH: He was trying to get to help, and he left a 14-year-old boy, I think, yeah, he

was 14 years old, he left him in charge, and he said he run them kids in that bus

till they couldn't go no more. To keep them alive, and he stayed alive.

They found him. But he said, those little ones, they just, dropped down, they

wouldn't move another inch. He'd keep running them and keep running them and

keep running them, and he just, he said to the point where he was wore out, he

couldn't move, even, no more, but I mean, those are the kinds of the bad

accidents down in that, and they still happen if they're not careful. Down in

there. HH. Well you, these storms, then, are part of your experiences in Colorado over the

years.

KH: Oh yes, very much so.

HH: Weather played a good part of the disasters in my lifetime. Course, you've got

to have it, you've got to have the moisture, but, like she was saying, that

lightning and those several, I had a cousin that was killed by lightning too,

that happened right along.

R: . Out on machinery?

HH: Well, yeah, he was, well, he was right on the end of the barn on a wagon,

pitching hay up in the hay mound you know, with that fork, that's all it takes,

a fork or a shovel, and they were asking for it, but, I don't know . . .

KH: They just didn't pay attention.

R: You say, you had were these winds through here all the time.

HH: Oh, yeah.

KH: Oh, yes.

R: And this was, is it windy in the Brighton area, and . . .

KH: Terribly.

R: Well, Longmont, Fort Lupton, all the way through here.

KH: My sister lives with her friend (?) she said they'd drive through the field to

get out. See.

HH: Well, when we lived out there, that was in, what, '71, '70-'71, w e w e r e

without electricity for eight straight days.

KH: And my sister for three weeks.

HH:, It tore all the power lines, even that big reclamation power line goes through

there, it's on these steel towers, it just twisted them up and laid them down

on the ground.

R: It's powerful, isn't it?

KH: It's terribly powerful.

HH: Snow, it froze all the wires, and that wind was rocking them, and finally they

just twisted up and down they went.

KH: But now we’re so fortunate, they give you all this information. They warn you. See, so when you don't get those, so you don't get those kinds of

accidents anymore like some of those schools.

HH: I remember those floods down at Platteville. . .

KH: They keep them in school, instead of sending them out.

R: Sending them out in the rural areas in the middle of a storm.

KH: That was the stupidest move. Why didn't they keep the children in the school-

house? They’d have been much safer than to put them on those buses and sent

them out. Kept them in town, you know.. But now they do that. But at that time

they had to take a bus and try to get those kids home. I, to this day, can' t

understand it.

R: Do you remember any in the thirties, in particular, when they talk about all

this blowing dust? Was it bad, as you recall, where you were then?

KH: Yes, there was one year I can remember, we lived over here on the Schlegel place

. . .

R: West of Longmont.

KH: West of Longmont, we had the beets all thinned. Beautiful beets. They were just

standing there, and Dad had worked ahead with cultivation for the next day. The

next day a windstorm come up and twisted them all off. We had to put something

else in that ground. And we had [hired help?] too. Very bad But in those days,

too.

R: And this is true in the Brighton area as well?

KH: Oh, very much so.

HH: That weather doesn't make distinction between people, you know what I mean. It

pretty well covers the whole area when it goes through.

KH: Brighton, too. And especially, if Boulder gets a bad one. Then that carries

right on over to Brighton. And the dust, I'll tell you something, a lot of times

it, if your back door was to the west, you had to come around and come in the

front door. It would just take that door and tear it away or the dirt would fly

right down into the basement. The dirt would just go . . . I would lay wet rags

and towels. I would take my best towels and wet them down and lay them in the windows so we could breathe. In the house. There was no choice, I mean.

R: Just so you could live through it.

KH: Yes. And then if your electric goes out, I was real fortunate, I still had my

good old coal stove, and I always had some wood in the house, and we were always

able to cook, we always had a kerosene light in the house, we were never worried

about . : .

R: You just had things that we just don't have in our houses these days.

KH: I still have them.

R: You're wise. When the power lines go down, like you say, why, you [inaudible].

HH: Two, Three weeks ago the electric juice was out right here. KH: Right here.

HH: Right here in the house for two hours without electricity and the furnace

wouldn't come on, she started up the fireplace and she got her kerosene lamp

out...

R: Good for you.

KH: Well, you've got to learn how to survive. I mean, you've got to -keep a few

things around, what is a little candle? Its a dangerous little thing. And so,

he called me, and I told him, I said, the electric is constantly going out, and

I had the fireplace going there's a little wood out here, but there was, that

snow was so bad when I went out to get that wood, my face was just caked, by the

time I come in. Yeah, and I always have farmer matches around to light my

kerosene lamps. That can happen in the middle of the summer, it can happen in

the winter, and even so, if the electric wouldn't come in here for twelve,

fourteen, sixteen hours, we’ve got heat, we could hold a skillet over it and fix

something to eat.

HH: Well, we've got a camp stove here.

KH: We've got a camp stove around all the time. Set it in if we had to. Or right

here.

HH: The furnace is tied to the electricity. KH: But when you have a fireplace, you don't have to worry, you're not gonna

[inaudible].

HH: You're not gonna freeze, but you could freeze some pipes.

R: Yeah, that's really true.

KH: Drain them if you have to.

HH: Well, we're getting away from the subject here.

R: Oh, we're talking about all kinds of things. That's true. Well, I shouldn't stay

terribly much longer, and we've been here most of the afternoon.

HH: Whatever you want me to tell you, you'd better start.

KH: If there's some more things you want to know . . .

R: We've covered a lot of the experiences here, really, in Colorado.

KH: You want some more out of Russia?

HH: I’m looking through this, all these questions really been answered.

R: Yes, a lot of them have. Well, I thought maybe, should I ask you, do either

one of you remember any stories in particular that your parents told about

Russia? Just to wind things up.

KH: Yeah,

R: A favorite story or something, you'd like to record?

KH: I looked over this here, I don't know exactly, I think it took me two hours to

get a little bit out of that tape, but the story that bothers me an awful lot,

and mother repeated it quit-often, was the one when her mother passed away when

she was eleven years old. And how they had to go out on the steppes and

work through the summer. And then her dad . . .

HH: You’d better explain what you mean by steppes.

R: You mean the big, flat prairies.

HH: Right.

KH: Yeah.

R: The fields. The grasslands.

HH: What would people think if they went out and sat on the front step?

R: All right, okay, a little different kind of step. KH: Out there they called it "die steppe", it's the flat fields, because most of

the people lived in the colonies and then they went out and farmed the ground.

Okay. And she lost her mother at the age of eleven. And I think she said there

was five children all totaled, younger than she was, so there was many a time

that she had to stay out with the horses with their little buckboard, that’s

about, what it was a buckboard, or a little wagon where they carried their

supplies off with, and stay with the horses at night, and she'd have to make,

her dad would help her make these straw, oh, how would I explain it in English?

HH: Torch.

KH: Torches, is more what they were, it was a torch to light in case the wolves came

out of the big forests, and they were usually after, at night, after colts, and

they were tied to this buckboard, and she was, she would be sleeping in the

center of this, and the minute those horses would start to snort, she knew

danger was around, and she said it was usually a wolf. Looking for food, which

wasn't anything that you’d say they wouldn't do, and she'd say the only way you

could fight them off is to throw these torches at them, and sometimes light one

once in a while, too. And I says, "An eleven-year-old girl, Mom? Are you

kidding me?" She said, "I'm not kidding you." She said, "That I did while my

dad went back to the village to see how the other little ones were getting

along and make sure they had something to eat, too." Many a time she said, "I

did that," you know. And . .

R: This is survival training you're talking about.

KH: That's the survival training, and she also did mention, too, that their home

was down into the ground quite heavily, because of the cold through the winter,

and then they had some windows, like we would our basement windows, those were

the windows, and then a lot of nights she said that her mother and dad would go

visit, maybe the next neighbor or somebody, and she'd be sitting there with the

little children, and, "Guess," she says, "what you'd see when you'd look up the

window. The wolves were sitting there looking in.” KH: "Well," she says, "didn't that scare you?" "Well," she said, "it doesn't make

you feel very good, but you'd better blow out the light." So that's all they

could do to make them leave, was to...

R: So they wouldn't be attracted to the light.

KH: So they wouldn’t be attracted to the light and who was sitting in the halls.

R: Was this a smaller village, then?

KH: Well, the same village that I m talking about, where she was born.

R: But they were not on the edge of town or something, as far as you knew.

KH: Well, I haven't been able to get a map. I don't know, she said Dad was back

to the village, she says, to take care of the other children, until he

remarried, this happened. And she never did tell me how long that took. I think

it took quite a while, because she could talk about having to do a lot of work

there for a while, she says, "We were so happy to see that second mother, we

almost all cried." But, and then she told a lot about how the men would cut the

grain and the women would tie, you know, take grain and make ties to tie the

bundles. They didn't have twine and all this sort of thing like that. I said,

"Did you like that?" She says, "Sure, I could . . . " You know, she used to do

it here in the States. If there was a broken bundle laying there, here she

stood, boy, it was just that quick, she had one tied and standing up. See, why

we, there's some of your . . .

R: You learn how to do those things and they stick with you.

KH: And they stuck with her. But I said to her, "Well, Mom, didn't you do a lot of

sewing and so on?" "Well," she says, "we did in the wintertime," but she said,

"you know, the women were the ones that milked the cows,” and they'd send the

animals out with the herder, he's the one who would have to herd the cows and

bring them in, and in the wintertime they were theirs. But she says, "our barns

were attached to the house."

R: They were? Attached?

KH: Attached to their house. The animals were just very close. It was too cold.

She'd say they just couldn't have them out, they had to be barned all through the winter. In the area that they lived. Now that [inaudible]

and that [Pobotschnaja ?], they were way, way north, and your parents were

further., what, was that south of them?

HH : Southwest, um-hmm.

KH: South and west.

HH: Well, there were a lot of villages around there where we lived, in my area.

R: Now when you talk about wolves, it sounds a little less densely settled than

in other areas.

KH: It was very densely settled.

HH: They were rather isolated. I told her, they were so ornery they didn't let

them come down with all the other people.

R: That's what he says (laughing).

KH: I think I have that information here somewhere. Isn't that on your sheet?

Where's the sheet I--your sheet? I put on there exactly when that village

took, when it was founded. You've got that information on there. Somewhere.

R: You mean on here? Oh. Okay.

HH: Wouldn't be on there, would it? That would be the church, but not the

village. You might have it in there somewhere else.

KH: No, that isn't it.

R: No, these are some other comments you made.

HH: You wrote mine down here like this. See, this is when the village I came from

was incorporated, in 1767, there was 143 people in that village, and then

by 1912, there was 3800, and that's when we left. And then by 1926, it had

dropped back to 2800, see how many people pulled out?

R: Pulled out. Indeed so.

HH: It's a migration.

KH: I had that written down exactly, I thought I sent that to you. When it was,

[inaudible], that meant, let me look . . .

R: Well, why don't I look through the rest of this information, and I can see if

you do have it here somewhere. HH: Well, I'm sure it was probably founded pretty near the same time, but,

KH: I found it. Yes, it was founded in [inaudible]. In 1767 there were

402 people. And in 1912, 8,845 people. I didn't put that on yours, I'm sorry.

HH: See, that's the same year as mine.

R: (To KH) That's all right. Okay, we've got it on the tape now, and I can take

that from there.

KH: That was [inaudible], that was when that was founded. Now, the colony of

[Pobotschnaja ?] was founded in the year 1772, that was the founding year, and

they didn't get the number of people, but in 1912, there were 3,411 people

already in that little village, so you see, and they were only 12 miles from

where the civil office was. And I think the reason that happened was this was

getting, they were running out of land here, and they started this one.

R: And they started a daughter colony.

HH: Um-hmm, you know how they divide that land around the village. If there wasn't

no more land available, They went out and started another one. And farmed

around it.

R: Right.

HH: A lot of people wonder why they had so many villages. Well, they had to do that

for their protection against these roving bands of, I don't know what they

called them, some of them . . .

KH : Kossacks .

HH: Some were the Kossacks, some were the, they had other names for them. Wild bands

of outlaws that were roving around it.

R: [inaudible] , I think.

HH: And they had to get in these, they had to, just like they did with the Indians

here.

R: For defense. For defense.

KH: For defense.

HH. They farmed around in that area as far as they could travel out and back in the same

day, they, when there wasn't nothing else available, they had to go out and start another one.

R: That's right. Hkl HH: That’s the reason they ad some many of those smaller villages. And then the

lay of the land wasn't always such that they could farm adjoining. There was

hills and forests, they had to clear the timber off or they had to go into

another clearer area that, you know, and that took a little more distance.

R: Useful land.

HH: Yeah, sure.

KH: But there's something here, about this [inaudible] area. Now, in 1912 it had

8,845 people, and in 1926, they've only got 15,000 people. Half of that colony

burnt. If you, if now, Timothy would probably know the history on this, that

colony, part of the clearing and a lot of people left there too, but 1926,

there were 15,000 people. You see the difference.

R: But 1912, 8,000. That's growth, [inaudible].

KH: Yeah, it's growth, but they had a terrible fire in that colony. And there was

a lot of people left too.

R Surely.

KH: They had a lot of growth, and I think that colony's still there. But . . .

R: It's so hard to find out about that these days.

KH: Oh, it's impossible. But I had gotten this out of a book that was, that Mrs.

Oblander has, and I'm gonna go back . . .

R: Now who is Mrs. Oblander?

KH: Oh, she has been . . .

HH: They live in Greeley.

R: In Greeley.

KH: Yes. Let’s see, Timothy has interviewed them two or three times. But she has

that book, and the only way she will hand it to anybody anymore, you have to

come to their house to read it, because she nearly lost it a

R: Well, hang on to something like that.

KH: You know, she fought till she found out, she lent that book to a person, and

that person would lend it to somebody in Denver, and finally by the time she traced that book, it had been all over, and she says, "I nearly lost that

book." And had that information

HH: You've got one of their books here, too, yet.

KH: : Oh, I was gonna as Timothy. This just came from Wiley [inaudible].

R: That's quite a haystack.

HH: It's a wagonload of hay.

KH: That's just a wagonload of hay.

HH: They moved that. They used two or three wagons in tandem, and it took them

about two or three days, they just loaded the hay and they come to that mill,

and they'd says, "What have you got on that?" Four, six, six span of horses. I

don't know whether they got four or two.

R: Yeah, it's hard to see.

HH: And they used, they had two or three wagons in tandem under that thing.

KH: I have a written a woman that should know about this, and she won't answer me.

So I don't know if I can. get an address of the library at Lamar or at Wiley.

I will, get the information on that contest. See, there was two mills, and

they got, one day, two companies had wagons, and they were gonna see which one

was going to, get their load of hay, there was sixteen ton on that. I watched

them move that.

R: You saw that.

KH: I saw that. It had to be in the middle of the winter, because they cut as it

went, and there was only one man that could handle all those horses, and they

wouldn't let anybody very close. He talked to them a while, course, as they

had to lay into that pull all at the same time. And he'd get them ready. He

wouldn't go in there and say, “All right, now,” you know, or whip them or

anything like that. He'd talk to them a while, and he'd say, "We're going to

move this load of hay," and so on and so forth, and he'd run all the people

back, that's the reason you don't see no people.

R: None at all. Just the dog.[observing] KH: One man, he says, "Now, nobody comes around when I'm moving that load of hay."

After I've unhitched the horses, why, then you can come." Three days for two

miles.

R: Well, do you remember any story that your father or mother told, in particular,

that you recall as a child?

HH: No not really. Except that my sister was telling me about some experiences

that Dad had, and he never did tell us anything, and we never did ask our

folks, but see, he was quite a horseman. And he got a job driving for what they

called in them days out there, [inaudible], which is a overseer. He was hired

by the government to oversee a certain area, be similar to, oh, you’d refer to

them here, probably like, the county commissioner, or something to that effect.

And he went out over this countryside overseeing all this government land which

in a lot of places was rented to the tenants. And he had the job driving this

guy. He not only had the finest horses, you know, that money could buy, and

it took an experienced horseman to handle them. This is what, he never would

tell us, but my sister was telling me one night.

KH: She started out . . . (laughing).

HH: He had this kind of a job. But this was more or less, see, like in the

summertime, or the wintertime when he wasn't busy on this acreage. Or he had

his brothers and his dad around doing it, they would take care of it, he had to

go and, oh, they talked about a lot of experiences they had, but I just can't

remember any-thing really in particular. Usually, the usual run-of-the-mill

stuff.

R: Okay, well, then that's, maybe I can sort of wind up here by saying that your

own lives, then, have really been primarily on the farm rather than in town.

KH : All our lives.

R: And would you say that, as you think of other German-Russians whom you have

known, many of them had similar experiences to you on the farms?

HH: Well, I suppose the majority of them were agricultural people. There was a lot

of them got into the skilled trades. A lot of them got educated, and went on,

but this was in the later years, I would say, probably after World War II. Prior to that, I would say the majority of them were farmers.

R: Um-hmm, Okay.

KH: They liked the land,

R: They liked the land.

HH: Well, the trouble was, you know, their parents weren’t too well sold on this

education thing, you know. The only way a lot of these kids got ahead, they

had to break away from the family and, you know, kind of strike out on their

own. Go into town, probably get a job in the factory or a shop, like they'd go

into Denver, I knew a lot of them that lived in Denver. But most of them

started on the land. When they got to this country it was the first thing

they'd come to, was the. land. And then, they branched out from there.

R: Was it hard on families when the children went off to Denver?

HH: Depends on if they had a big farm, yeah, I suppose. They just, they missed

their hired hand, had to hire people to replace them then, you know, and this

type of thing. Yeah.

KH: I would say, yes, they did. In some cases I can remember, too, for a girl or a

boy would break away from the family at a very, well, the age limit at that

time, is you stuck there until twenty-one.

R: Um-hmm, this is what I've heard.

KH: That, there was no such a thing as you had rights when you were eighteen or

nineteen. The teenager, but it did happen a little bit to a degree in our own

family. I can remember even my own brothers, whenever Saturday night or

afternoon came around, they had to go and polish the car and a few things like

that when they should have been out with the rest of us girls. They didn't so

much break away, but it seemed like it was beginning to show that they wanted

to be out on their own. You know. If you understand what I mean. And...

R: Was it sort of an Americanization tug of war? Or was it just?

KH:: No, I think it was, an American [inaudible], to a degree. HH: It was, you see, they'd see other kids doing it, and they'd start aching to do

it themselves, you know, and they'd go out, well, you can't blame them, you

know. After all, they did grow up out of the horse and buggy days. Times

change and they keep right on changing.

KH: That they do. And there's some, we took, for example, like us, we felt that we

had been hurt on the farm. I have to give you a little bit of what a minister

said. I heard a minister one time in a sermon, he said, "You are worrying so

much about your children getting an education. Are you sure that you are in

the right?" And he gave his points on it. He said, "Are you sure that they

wouldn't be better off with Mother and Dad?" You know, they were, he was

talking to this generation that we were. We were working terribly hard, and he

saw it, he saw that we were letting our children go to school, we were working

very hard to get them through school, "Are you on the right road?" And that

come to my mind today now. Where we're having so much trouble with our youth.

Are we on the right road?

R: Uh-huh. Gives us something to think about, doesn't it?

HH: Well I know I think we are, more or less. Now ours wanted to quit school and

work on the farm, and I told them, "Nothing doing." I said, "You get educated

first," and I says, "That won't be no hindrance to you if you want

to farm later on." I said, "That won't hurt a thing at all." You know, not

a one of them come back. See, the girls married in town, and the girls didn't

want to come out to the farm, they never did come back, but now they wish they

could you know, have a little land, more for a hobby, you know, than to make a

living off of it. That's about as far, that's about the extent of it, but . ,

KH: We're talking about our old family. I'm looking at the overall youth now. We

have had some experiences not long ago where some of the young people have gone

through high school and they haven’t had enough education, and w e suggest

vocational schools, and they think, well, "Why didn't I go to a vocational school

and learn something that's of value?" We can't go back to the land anymore. The

way we used to be. It's all getting bigger. It' getting corporate to do.

You can't even go out and take forty, fifty thousand dollars and start

farming. That's a joke.

R: In this day and age.

KH: In this day and age.

R: Yeah.

KH: That's a joke, really. And then I got to thinking later on, well, we made

it through, Harold and I without a college education, and yet we feel, you

know ,our daughter got her a job this weekend. "Mom," she said, "you know

some of my aunts feel deprived. You can't educate ten or twelve children.

R: Right. That’s a hard one to answer, too. Yeah. Well, it's probably getting

close to dinnertime. I . . .

KH: Oh, is it? We don't eat dinner.

R: You don't eat dinner.

KH . [inaudible]

R: Great.

(End of tape)