Living in a Bottle Full of Wishes

The '60s "I Dream of Jeannie" TV show turned 50-years-old earlier this month, and I was a fan.

My childhood friend Gail Piper and I enjoyed turning her family's corner couch into the bottle that Barbara Eden's character lived in. 

Joyce, Gail's mom, let us pull her high-back dining room chairs near the couch. Somehow we put up sheets over the couch to the windows so we could get in and experience that rounded house feel. Is this why I have a fascination with the tiny house movement? 

Jeannie's apparel and hairdo fascinated us. Gail and I took empty tubes from wrapping paper supplies (because the cardboard was stiffer and the circumference bigger than paper towel rolls) and assembled bee-bop ponytails on top of our heads.

Did we take the bottom of our button-down shirts and tie the ends to show our belly buttons? Maybe. 

We even had bottles that we affectionately dubbed our genie bottles.

Here is mine. 

Yes, I still have it.

This was one of my mom's perfume bottles—and it was empty—we didn't drain it. Now the bottle houses a dried-up rose on a shelf near my jewelry box.

When I stumbled upon "The Today Show" interviewing Barbara Eden about the anniversary of the show, I frantically searched for the hand drawn picture of Jeannie that Gail's mom Joyce drew for me. 

See it there over on the left? I've cherished it all these years. 

I snapped a picture of it and tweeted it. And guess what? Barbara Eden starred it! Well, whoever runs her page did if she didn't.

Now that's a wish that was granted without a request.
 


What television characters did you act out in your youth? Did you ever wish, that just for a day, a show would be true? Do you have any mementos from your childhood make-believe play time?

The Middle Years of a 90-Year-Old's Life

Dad has always seemed old to me since he was 41-years-old by the time I came along.

So when we celebrated his Christmas Eve birthday a couple weeks ago, his white hair and 90 candles made me realize that now he really is old.

A family picture before me. Standing man: a German foreign exchange student.

What follows catalogs Dad's mid-life years as a 40-50-60-year-old when he raised his last child (me) and began his role as a father-in-law and a grandpa. These are some of the advancements and changes a middle-aged farmer from east central South Dakota experienced from 1954 to 1984.

For Dad's younger years, read the earlier post, First 30 years of My Dad's 90-Year-Old Life. 


Part II: The Next 30 Years


Developments on the Farm: 1954-1964, Decade #4
TV Enters the Home 

After Mom and Dad poured the cement foundation for a granary all by themselves, they weren’t quite sure what to do next until neighbor Josh Hofer came along and offered to help. They paid him a dollar an hour in 1954. When the job was done, Josh earned a $500 bonus.

the granary: the building with a smile, according to my nieces who lived nearby

 

In 1957, a telephone company installed phone lines, quite different from the farmer's lines I wrote about last time. A party line consisted of ten homes per line. Each home had a different ring, so if you wanted to eavesdrop, quietly lift the receiver.

Also in that year, Dad purchased the family's first TV, a Silvertone. Before that, Uncle Jr. was the first one with a television. "The picture was just white fuzz up at Jr.'s," Dad said. "By the time we got ours, the reception was better."

Is that a Silvertone TV behind me one Christmas? (I have stitches by my eye, long story)

In this decade, Dad also bought two 560 International tractors, two cultivators, and two five bottom plows. The landscape of the farm changed in 1963 when two white concrete silos were constructed.

Not long after my Grandma Elizabeth's death in '55 (I wrote about her in Namesake), neighbor Dave T. Decker sold his farm to Dad in 1958. This farm, with one white silo, was a little over a mile away from the main place and would eventually be my brother's home with his wife and five children, the nieces and nephews with whom I grew up.

Elliott's farm in 2011 ~ currently only a sheep barn, not pictured above, remains

Growing Family: 1964-1974, Decade #5

Lots of Lambs and Hogs ~ in other words, a ton of work

A highlight of this decade was witnessing the 1969 moon landing. The folks saw it on TV with Warren and Mary G Wipf while stopping to eat at a truck stop in Mitchell. Mary G was Mom's cousin whom I wrote about here.

The Marken family moved onto the other farm as Dad's hired help, and Dad began raising sheep. Before I was born, the Marken's left, so Dad hired Roy Horsley. Roy raised sheep too, so this was a big help. Dad recalled driving with him all the way to Hutchinson, Kansas, to purchase more sheep. The barn on the second farm was full of them. So full, that they took turns pulling all-nighters to keep an eye on them. 

Sheep, when born, need to be in a small pen with the mother. They can't mingle like calves do, Dad said. They must be given time to adjust. Out of room in the main barn, the men had to shuffle pens around inside and out. It was such a struggle that Roy said he wouldn't go through another lambing season like that. So, not wanting to lose an expert sheep farmer, my progressive father built another barn.

the sheep barn on Elliott's yard in 2011

A problem arose one time when it was time to sheer the sheep. Cold weather arrived, and the heat of the sheep rose to the frosty roof consisting of only plywood with no shingles. The dripping from the roof made the sheep too wet to sheer. Dad rounded up all the Nipco heaters he could find from the neighbors. He hung them from the rafters to dry off the critters, so the scheduled sheep sheering day could proceed.

I barely remember those sheep days. I'd fall asleep on an old couch in the barn after I had been told to get off the bus at Horsley's because everyone was over there tending to the lambs. Ironically, as I was working on this post, Roy passed away. Click here for his obituary. 

here I am bottle-feeding some lambs

In July of 1970, a few days after I turned 4-years-old, the family took their first commercial airplane trip. It was to Detroit for my brother Elliott's wedding. Read Curlers, a Bra, and an Airplane Ride for details about that wedding and others. Elliott eventually moved back to farm with Dad about the time the Horsleys moved back to Wessington Springs, Roy's hometown.

But before Roy left, Dad got into hogs, since Roy was a hog man too. A hog farrowing barn was built, and they'd planned to furrow four times a year. "The first time we weened 400 pigs," Dad said. I wrote about this building here in my Why I Hate Birds series last summer. But by the time Elliott returned to South Dakota to farm with Dad, the building had been sanitized and locked up. He was done with hogs—for now.

In 1973 and 1974, a slick salesman talked Dad into putting up two blue Harvestores with an automated feeding system. I enjoyed the smell of silage and would pretend I was an assembly line worker at McDonald's—only I'd be serving cattle. These blue tubes forever changed the landscape of the farm. Dad now says, "I would have fared very well without that purchase."

the silos and the Harvestores

Trying Times: 1974-1984, Decade #6
Drought & Debt

Had the worst crop in 1976. Dad suffered from migraine headaches.

Pastures were bare. One time he closed off the township road and put a up a "disaster area" sign so the cattle could graze the ditches. By the end of the day, those were bare too.

These are the years in which I grew up.

Dad ended up selling all the cattle. Mom stood at the screen door and cried as the semi trucks drove off with the livestock. But like all farmers, Dad still had hope. Hope for rain, for a crop, for an income.

In retrospect, Dad said he wished he would have kept and cows and sold the feeder cattle, but he followed the predictions that the following year was going to be dry too. It wasn't. The grass grew three feet tall. 

Elliott kept asking Dad, "When you gonna get back into hogs?" Dad said a few days would go by and his son would again ask, "Ever gonna get back to raising hogs?"

And boy did they. Eventually, a larger hog confinement operation was constructed. It included a cage room, a nursery, and a finishing house. My cousin Wilmer Kleinsasser (whom I wrote about here and here), was hired on as a farmhand, and he hauled the pork to Huron for slaughter. I always thought it was rather sad that some hogs never saw the light of day until that fateful ride. Those hogs help pay for my college education.
 

hog barns in 2011, dormant again

Another building came about after my brother-in-law Rick helped Dad and Elliott clear the spot where the Butler Building, a machine shed, was to be located. I loved that building, even though birds sometimes got in, for it was my indoor basketball court—when Dad finally followed through on a promise to get me one. He hired Gene McMillian in the early 80's to create the movable goal—and not the kind that just changed the height of the hoop. The entire thing could be moved, inside or out. It cost $300.

My dad, always the elaborate one. He never does things small-scale.

Despite the stress of the farm, Dad's always been a man of progress and dreams. Farming is a gamble. And the entire family was a part of the risk. A family, that by now, included quite a few grandchildren.

60-years-old ~ behind him is the room of his birth

Do you have relatives like my dad? Any risk takers among your ancestors? Any big dreamers? Maybe you possess those traits and would like to share.

Writer's Note: In the next post, Old Age Creeps In: Decades 7, 8, and 9.

Seven Silly Tidbits

Do you possess any unique abilities? 

I can squat so that my elbows touch the floor without lifting up my heals. Try it: put your feet in a V-position and squat. When kids attempt it, they fall over or almost rip their pants. I thank my jr. high basketball coaches, Ruth Hausemann and Cindy Borkowski, for my flexibility. They required stretching of hamstring, quads, calves, and more before we did a thing in practice.

Me at 40. I can still do it eight years later.

What ability or skill do you wish you had?

Operating a hair dryer to style my hair. I just don't get it. Hair stylists have patiently tried to teach me. I can't do it. For those like me, here's how to solve this problem: go to bed with it wet so it will puff up by morning. I place a towel on my pillow to absorb the moisture. It also serves as a drool catcher.

If you could live anywhere in the world and afford it upon your retirement, where would that be? 

 

In my childhood home in South Dakota renovated by my HGTV favorites: the Property Brothers, the Fixer Upper couple, the Love It Or List It duo, and the Flip or Flop couple. I have fond childhood memories of that house, and it would be the best place to grow old—just like my dad. At 89, he's living in the house he was born in. Parts of the house are ready to fall in, so all those HGTV reinforcements and remodeling gurus would be necessary. I would need lots of money to pull it off.

 

Believe me, it looks even worse now. This was back in 2011. Paint alone would do wonders.

You can only keep one modern amenity in your home. What would you pick between the microwave, the Internet, and the television? 

 

I have always loved TV. As a little girl, I got in trouble for sitting too close to it. As an adult, I do housework and exercise while watching TV. I do enjoy cooking, so I could live without a microwave, and I can get Wi-Fi at work or in public places, so unlike my husband, I could survive without the Internet at home. There is nothing like sitting down with my doggies and watching television. TV is like another person to me. It talks to me and I talk back to it. No, I’m not Mildred from Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. I don't have three walls of it, but I do own four televisions.

What is your greatest fear?

A tornado or some other disaster destroying, not my house, but all of my computer generated documents. So for years, I have had a tornado file. I coined the term a long time ago when Esther Mayer, one of our school's maintenance employees, caught me running off papers and stuffing them into manilla envelopes at the end of the school year. I told her I was making copies to store at my sister Priscilla's in South Dakota. Thus came the term, tornado file. Now I just switch out jump drives when I go up for a visit. But I do have back-ups in my house on an external drive, on my home PC, and on another jump drive. I keep a jump drive in my desk at school too. No, I do not trust the Cloud, Dropbox, or Google Drive for my back-ups. I want access without the Internet. A bit overkill? Maybe, but this is a fear I can do something about, so I will do everything I can to prevent losing over two decades worth of work.

Biggest regret?

I should have taken a basic economics class in college. If I had, I might actually understand the difference between stocks and bonds, an annuity, a 401B, and a Roth IRA. I might even be able to explain what the heck a mill levy is. My oldest nephew Michael has given me countless lessons on these terms, but I do not retain any of it. Taking an economics course might have stopped me from making money mistakes. To learn more about those, read my post entitled, Dollars and Sense: A Lesson in Interest of a Different Kind.

Future wishes?

I have been an aunt since I was 6-years-old, and I want to be healthy enough to live so I can be a great-great-great aunt. I am already a great aunt with my oldest great, Leah, being 12-years-old. So if she marries in eight years and has a child soon after, I will be in my mid-50's and become a great-great. Then if her child gets married around 20 and has a child right away, I'll be a great-great-great and be in my mid-70s. That's possible. Now, if I have to depend on the youngest great, the one to be born this November to my niece Suzanne and her husband David, I'll have to make it well past a hundred years old for it to all work out using that have-a-kid-at-20 formula. 

I am in the middle surrounded by my nieces and nephews. From these 8, come 19 greats.

 

You are given a chance to meet and spend time with one of your relatives who is no longer living. Who would it be?

After I wrote my answer, I decided this person deserves more than a few sentences. Will it be one of my second cousins, my grandparents, my mom, one of my aunts or uncles, or my state wrestling champ cousin? Stayed tuned for a future post about this person.

Writer's Note: I was tagged by my online writing friend and fellow blogger, Shelli Littleton, to post random pieces of information about myself. So I interviewed myself and had fun writing this post. Thanks, Shelli, for the inspiration of this post and some others to come! The link for Shelli's list is here.