The Life of Me: An Autobiography

by Clarence Edgar Johnson

By 1940 the price of cream was up and a year later it was up even more. We had a lot of cows that gave a little milk each, and we already had a cream separator. So we bought a gasoline engine to run the separator and I started milking the cows and selling cream. That paid so well that we started feeding the cows more and selling more cream. Our cream was bringing three dollars a day and we were feeding the skim milk to hogs that were gaining two dollars a day. Oh boy! The depression seemed to be over for us. But it turned out that this business had another side to it. The work was killing us.

I sat there milking by hand three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, and the weather was hot. By the time I had milked those twenty cows, I could almost swim in my own sweat. When I walked I could hear it squash in my shoes; and I smelled so bad I had to bathe before the tractor would let me get close to it. There was only one good thing about it; it beat maize hauling ten to one.

While I was milking one cow, Anita was feeding the next one and getting her ready to be milked, Dennis was carrying milk to the house and pouring it into the separator which was being driven by the gasoline engine, and Ima was filling in here and there and keeping house and seeing after Larry.

The kids always wanted me to milk Old Pet last. They could ride her out of the pen and up by the house as she went on her way to the field to graze. They got a free ride home and Old Pet didn't mind. She wouldn't pitch nor run, but just walk as though there were no kids around.

But there was one day Anita fell off Old Pet. They were riding the cow in the cow lot after a rain and the lot was boggy and messy. Dennis was in front and Anita was on behind him. The cow started under a low shed and Dennis realized that he would be dragged off it he didn't do something. There was no way to stop the cow nor turn her, so Dennis did something all right. He grabbed hold of a joist above his head to avoid being dragged off into the filth below. Meantime, since Anita was behind Dennis, she couldn't reach anything to hold onto, so she was forced off backward and landed in a sitting position, momentarily, until she lost her balance and fell backward in six inches of cow-lot slush.

Guess what Ima thought when Anita got to the house. She could hardly recognize her little girl, but she could tell where her little girl had been. The evidence was not all on her back. She had to roll over on her stomach to get up and out, so her front and her long hair had quite a bit of evidence on them also.

Experimenting had taught us that cows would do almost as well grazing sudan grass a couple of hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the afternoon, as they would if they grazed all day, and the grazing would last twice as long. So when the weather was dry and grazing was scarce, we would drive the cows out and close the gate after a couple of hours grazing each morning. Then we would turn them back in at four o'clock in the afternoon. But this presented a problem. We were not always home at four in the afternoon. What could we do about that? Let the alarm clock turn them in, of course. And that is what we did. I rigged it up and it worked perfectly. It opened the gate a lot better than it built the fire in the wood heater many years before.

We had no electricity on the farm until 1949. Before that time rural electricity was only a promise of better things to come. Sometimes the summer heat teamed up with the lack of a breeze to make the weather almost unbearable. But since I wasn't very well known in Washington at that time, and since I wasn't personally acquainted with my congressmen, I didn't ask them for an air conditioning unit. Instead, I did what I could on my own. I took the gas engine from the cream separator and put it on an oil drum outside one window. Then I put a large fan blade on the shaft, aimed it toward a window, cranked it up and let it blow air through the window and all through the house. It was far short of air conditioning like we have today, but it was a lifesaver sometimes, and it wasn't inflationary.

Now, all this hard work, dry weather, inconveniences, and low farm wages got us to wondering if we might be missing something. So in the fall of 1943 we toyed with the idea of getting into war work. Later the toying became a definite plan which led to the purchase of a travel trailer. In November we stored our furniture, left our farm machinery for Earl to sell, and headed for California. We knew some folks who had gone to California from Royston and they told us to come on out, the wages were fine. We called it war work, but its purpose was twofold, to help produce the weapons of war and to help the Clarence Johnsons make more money faster. But getting into war work wasn't all that easy.

Before I could work at any job I had to get a release from farming, because farming was an essential industry in the total effort toward winning the war. I went to the Sweetwater Employment Agency Office and they couldn't give me a release. They sent me to the Abilene office, and Abilene didn't have the authority to grant me a release either. They told me I would have to go to the Sweetwater office. I told them that Sweetwater had sent me to Abilene. Then they told me I would have to go to Dallas.