Part 3.  “Blunt is engrained in me.”

My own family became involved with Blunt in the early 1950s before I was born, when my mother and father, Linda and Ray Dimmick who moved to SD from Kansas and Oklahoma respectively, purchased our farm with its farmhouse, big red barn with a hay loft, and a lot of other outbuildings including a chicken coop. They bought the pastureland up behind our farmhouse and corrals for the ranching component of their new endeavor, where they raised cattle, sheep and pigs. They also purchased many surrounding pastures and cultivated fields, where they grew mainly wheat, but also alfalfa, maize (not corn but maize) and barley. Once in a while my dad would also plant corn, but mainly he was a wheat farmer, growing the agricultural mainstay of mankind on planet earth from the beginning of civilization.

This is exactly how our SD wheatfields looked.

The cereal grain of wheat was originally grown in the Levant region within the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, and was a key factor enabling the emergence of city-based societies because it was one of the first crops that could be easily cultivated on a large scale and had the additional advantage of long-term storage without degradation. Globally, wheat is the leading source of vegetable protein in human food, having a higher protein content than other major cereals, corn or rice. Wheat growing techniques reached Greece and India by 6500 BCE, and by 6000 BCE it was grown as well in Egypt. It was, in fact, early Egyptians who discovered that yeast could make ground wheat flour and water expand, thus inventing the bread eaten around the globe today. The Egyptians developed several types of ovens, taking bread-baking into one of the first large-scale food productions in the world. Wheat growing technology spread throughout Europe and England and even reached China by 2000 BCE. Skipping forward a couple of millennia, Europeans brought wheat seeds and knowledge with them as they made their presence felt across the continent they named North America. All of this leads up to my family and me living in smack dab in the middle of North America’s “bread basket”.

My family’s farm was situated almost exactly on top of the 100th Meridian.

It is highly unlikely that my parents had the same level of interest in the history of wheat production that I have, because they were a bit busy with the concerns of keeping a complicated enterprise flourishing and because I am trained as an historian and love to get to the bottom of things, to solve puzzles, to understand complexities. Nevertheless, this much I can say for certain: from early spring, as soon as the earth could be worked, the days for both of my forks revolved around preparing the fields for planting, sowing the wheat, and then watching the weather reports and fixating on spring rains (or even snows). My mom could and did drive a tractor as well as any man and, as a matter of fact, I think she enjoyed doing so. There is a lot of instant gratification in working a field; you can observe in a glance what you have already accomplished and what is left to do.

This vintage picture above is not of my mother, but it gives you a sense of how she must have felt.  Driving a tractor in a dirty field was the kind of activity women took on during WWII.  My mother was nothing if not game for new adventures.  I get a lot of my own spunk from her.
In a good year, all would go well and by early summer, the wheat was knee high. By August, if the wheat plants hadn’t been shredded by hail storms, desiccated by the lack of rain, or ruined by a plague of grasshoppers, everything in our household centered on harvest preparation. My dad and his brother-in-law in Oklahoma purchased an expensive combine together and, after the Oklahoma harvest in early summer, my Uncle Dan Venosdel and his sons and other hired hands moved the combine slowly northward on a giant truck bed, stopping to harvest wheat for farmers across Kansas and Nebraska, moving ever northward, following the graduated ripening of wheat from south to north across the bread-basket of the United States. Many phone conversations between my dad and my uncle helped my uncle get the combine to Blunt just in time to harvest our crops.

When I was 11, my Uncle Dan patiently taught me to drive a pick-up truck on the country roads outside Alva, Oklahoma, where my dad’s extended family had settled. I would pop the clutch and lurch along the road at the beginning, giggling in embarrassment as my endlessly patient uncle told me over and over how to manage the clutch and get the gear shift into third not fifth gear, driving by the section of property which would someday be mine, and had been staked by a female ancestor back in the 1880s Oklahoma Land Rush. I spent many happy summers with my cousins and aunt and uncle and other extended family in Oklahoma and I also liked knowing how to drive a pick-up with the gear shift. When I had that mastered, I found driving a car with an automatic transmission to be a piece of cake, chocolate cake specifically.

Back in South Dakota, with my newly acquired ability to drive, I was able to help move equipment from one field to the next and I thought that was so much fun. I was the only one of my friends who knew how to drive. It is also legal in both Oklahoma and South Dakota for kids to drive without a driver’s license when they are assisting in the family’s farming operations.

My mother spent hours planning menus and shopping for food and then cooking huge meals for all these harvesters, frying up to ten chickens in the morning for the noontime picnics with potato salad and pickles that she had canned the season before from cucumbers we grew in our garden. Some summers my mother’s mother, Edna Humphries, would be with us and she, an excellent baker, loved to create some of her masterpieces for these men. She made killer cinnamon rolls with a caramel glaze and a rhubarb sauce with sweet dumplings, that I sometimes dream about from rhubarb grown in our garden and chopped up and frozen each spring. My grandma was a superb baker and never used a recipe. Sometimes these two bossy women, my mom and grandma, would even let me get into the kitchen to bake several chocolate cakes from a no-fail recipe my mom had, although she typically preferred to be in the kitchen alone so she could make hay while the sun was shining, so to speak.

But I made many successful “Chocolate 1-2-3” cakes and the guys ate them up like candy. Here’s the recipe for the easy to make, easy to love, chocolate cake I made for my merry little band of men, time after time. It takes no time to whip up, the ingredients are simple and easy to have on hand. Once you have this recipe in your repertoire, you will never use a box mix again:

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Linda Dimmick’s Chocolate 1-2-3 Cake

1 1/4 C flour 1 C water
1/3 C unsweetened cocoa powder 1/3 C vegetable oil
1 C sugar 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon salt & 3/4 teaspoon of baking soda 1 tablespoon cider vinegar
Put all the dry ingredients into the pan (9 x 13 inches) in which you will be baking the cake. Mix it all together. Make 3 wells in the in the dry mixture and add the water to one well, the vegetable oil in another well, and the vanilla extract and vinegar in the 3rd well. Stir slowly with a fork in small circles and make sure you get all the corners. If you don’t stir this mixture really well, you will be sorry when you bite into a piece of cake with a lump of flour or baking soda. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 30 minutes. Insert a cake tester in
center of cake and if it comes out clean, the cake is done. Cool and cut, after sprinkling with powdered sugar to make the cake look extra attractive. Keep in mind that you consume your food first with your eyes, so keep it pretty people! If you have some lilac blooms or leaves, decorate the plate with those too. Why not? You only live once!

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My mother and I would load up all of the food, dishes, and cutlery in her car trunk and take it to the men in the fields, with gallons of iced tea or lemonade and water, as well as water for washing hands and faces and towels to dry off with. This was simple fare, easy to eat outdoors, while sitting on the bare earth in the shade of my mother’s car. As everybody from Blunt knows, August can be hot and these men would be thirsty and covered with a fine layer of pulverized straw from harvesting wheat.

After the men had eaten, relaxed and laughed for a while, they would sometimes insist on taking me, my mother, and/or even my grandmother for a ride on the combine with them as they harvested a row or two, but it was too hot, dirty, noisy and uncomfortable for us to enjoy. My mom and I would load the car back up and head off for home. We still had a lot more work to do before our day was done.