Part 4 of “Blunt in engrained in me.”

Back at the farmhouse, we had a clever little outbuilding that was actually a primitive shower constructed in the early 20th-century. It had a huge metal barrel attached to the top and simple gravity allowed you to be showered with the warm water flowing through a shower head when you pulled a chain inside. The only time of year this little outfit was used was during harvest. At the beginning of the season, it was my job to unlock and spiff up the shower building and then, every morning during harvest, one of my daily chores was to fill the barrel with well water from the garden hose. By mid-afternoon the water would be very warm indeed from solar power.

I was smart and took a long, luxurious shower around 4 p.m., long before the men returned home for showers and supper at sundown, usually sometime between 8 and 9 p.m. Then I topped off the barrel water with the hose and nobody was the wiser. I could have bathed in the house in the bathroom, but I found the little wooden outbuilding with the homemade shower irresistible. It was warm and cosy inside, with very clean unpolished wood, and it smelled of soap, wet warm wood and warmed South Dakota well water. What could be better than that? If we had added a little bench to sit on and lined the building with cedar and added some little river stones, we could have called the building a spa. For sure it was spare and Zen like! Darn it! I missed the opportunity to sell faux-spa treatments to these harvesters! I could have made a fortune. But, when I was 12, 13, and 14, I had never heard of a spa or Zen. And not only that, my men would have said, “huh? a what?” because they wouldn’t have known what a spa was either, let alone a “faux-spa in the tradition of Zen!” They would have had me committed to a lunatic asylum for heat stroke.

After my own afternoon spa treatment, I went back indoors to get in my mother’s way and snatch some samples of the food she was preparing for supper for all these men. She would have pies going into and coming out of the oven and cuts of the finest roasted beef I have ever eaten in my whole entire lifetime from the cattle she and my dad had raised, slaughtered and stocked in our deep freezer. In addition, my mom would whip up excellent mashed potatoes with gravy made from the juices of the roasted beef, pots of green beans cooked with bacon, vessels of corn on the cob which she would cook at the last minute, and slices of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers that we had picked that afternoon from our garden. Plus there were gallons of more iced tea brewing. No meal at our house was complete without bread and butter. Don’t forget we were growing wheat, so we always ate bread! Thanks Egypt!

I set the table for my mom and then we awaited the arrival of our harvest crew. She might lie down for a power nap or to read a book, because she still had a very long day and evening ahead of her with serving and then cleaning up, and I would entertain myself in my bedroom with my dolls, maybe making them lilac-leaf pocketbooks, or reading one of my favorite books from a series about a girl my age in upstate New York who was smart and loved to solve mysteries.

Other young girls I knew liked Nancy Drew books, but Trixie Belden was my absolute favorite character. I still have those childhood books in my Seattle apartment today. On days when I need a little hit of home, I take one down and devour it and I might even whip up a 1-2-3 cake. Miss Belden had a lot of spunk and ingenuity, just like me. She was a younger version of Scarlett O’Hara, is how I would best describe her. All three of us were the can-do kind of females that I most admire.

Eventually the men started arriving at our farm in trucks and would take turns cleaning off the wheat dust and grime in the outdoor shower, and then, squeaky clean —so clean their skin shined— they dressed and amused themselves by playing endless practical jokes on each other, wrestling one another in the grass, or took turns hitting a baseball with my bat on our gravel driveway. Finally my mother would announce that supper was ready and everybody swarmed to the table. These hearty feasts on a late, dark, summer evening, with the fans working overtime to cool off the hot kitchen, and the outdoor sounds of cicadas thrumming their mating calls and crickets chirping around the house foundation, and the indoor sounds of laughter and the high spirits of young men from Oklahoma and Kansas created a very special atmosphere. These nights were something very special and the meals were as festive as any holiday dinner. These fun-loving, outgoing guys adored my mom for keeping them happily filled with her good home cooked simple fare. Me, they just affectionately teased, and I honestly could not have been happier!

Truth to tell, these harvest dinners were our holidays and I loved them. The picture above is just a random shot from the internet, but our house was never more lively and full of happy sounds than over these great meals. After eating and all manner of male hi jinx, the boys would go back outdoors to sleep on cots set up in the quonset hut that my mom and I had prepared for them during the day with fresh sheets, blankets and pillows. Do you remember the feel and scent of bed linens that have been washed and then dried on an outdoor clothesline? There is absolutely nothing I love more than that feeling you get when you crawl between two crisp sheets laundered in this way. The stiff linens and the fresh fragrance cannot be achieved in any other method. Trust me, I have tried.

I actually enjoyed looking after all these rowdy guys; it was the highlight of my year of farm life. Make no mistake: I wouldn’t have enjoyed providing the home care of cooking and housekeeping much longer or on a smaller scale (i.e. I had no interest in being a farmer’s wife and living on a farm—I longed for the big city life with bright lights and endless activities), but the fact that I was the honorary little sister and the only girl in the bunch made me feel really happy and well looked after. I knew that nothing bad could happen to me with all these great men around, even though these were the years that we also watched for (and seriously believed we spotted) UFOs, as well as seeing a bunch of great scary movies at the Pierre drive-in theatre (it was always so sad for me to see the annual fall sign appear on the marquee: “Closed for the season, reason: freezin’ “) such as The Fly and its ilk.  My 17 year old brother, Gary Jones, and his sweet, beautiful girlfriend, Cheryl Hageman, took me to the drive in theater to see The Fly the summer I was 12 and I was so scared they worried that my parents would be furious.  They weren’t.  I don’t think my fears caused by movies even registered on my folks’ radar.

Then there was the televised episodes of that black-and-white masterpiece, The Twilight Zone (do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do). Oouuu! spine chilling!

Decades later I would try to explain to my son, when he was around 10 and asked me, that I don’t know why, but people love to be scared by movies and television shows. Why is that, I still wonder?

I would squeal like a little girl while watching all these horror flicks and shows (I actually was one, so I can say that. But, this isn’t an expression that people should use to derisively describe scared men; then it is sexist and condescending toward the female gender and of that I can never approve. I will talk you down anytime you try to say anything like that in my earshot. Trixie Belden, Scarlett O’Hara, Gloria Steinhem, Cheryl Sandberg and I just cannot abide anyone who thinks our gender is less than the male gender. In fact, we know that we are superior in all the ways that matter!) and cover my eyes with my hands, then peek through my fingers.

I can remember one drive-in movie my mother took me, Sandy Small and Jeannie Bourke to; in that black-and-white low-budget film, menacing ivy vines started growing around a small house and even a kid knew that the oblivious people inside were in trouble. Get out, people, get out, we screamed! Sure enough, the vines eventually took over the building and trapped the poor people inside. How could they ever get out now, when every time they hacked an opening through the vine it would grow ever bigger like metastasizing cancer cells. We jumped, we screamed, we giggled and had a blast! There wasn’t much of a plot, but truthfully, a plot would have been superfluous.

We had the soft warm evening, each other’s company, and my sweet patient mother as our chauffeur and supplier of funds for popcorn, sodas and lots of delicious candy. She later took us all back to our farmhouse and we girls toddled off to bed and fell fast asleep, all three of us in one double bed. Whatever in the world could be better than a summer night like that? Life could be so very, very good.

I can fondly remember making trips with my dad in the cabin of his truck filled with the harvested wheat to the town’s grain elevators and train stop, where Pat Junkman ran the show.  The one in Blunt looked something like this photo.

It was fun to line up with the other trucks and wait our turn at uploading the wheat into waiting train cars. Normally in Blunt you didn’t have to line up for anything, because there weren’t very many of us to start with (353 to be exact)! The elevator was cooler than anywhere else around me, because it was in the shade, and I loved the earthy smell of the wheat kernels. It was fun to run your hands through the wheat gathered in the truck bed; it felt soft and cool and poured through your hands like water. Then my dad would listen to the radio and scan newspapers for the price being paid per bushel on the commodities markets. At the time I didn’t understand the importance of all this, but in my 20s in Seattle my stockbroker employer sent me to school to get my Series 7 license so I could place buy and sell orders for stocks and puts and calls for commodities for our customers, and so I came to realize that the prices my dad was studying determined how well my he and mom would be repaid for all their hard work and tremendous planning. So many steps are involved in being a successful farmer. I always wish the world understood that better.

When people say to me that I am blunt, what they mean is that I am very frank, that I am not afraid to tell the unvarnished truth about things. It is true. I’m very honest. I don’t mince words, but clearly state what I believe to be true or false. When I lived on the East Coast for a large part of my professional career, working in some of our nation’s finest art museums as a curator, I would always just be me and, when I liked an idea a colleague had, I said so. When I didn’t like something, I also said so. My frank expressions would cause people to take notice of me. Most people won’t express what they really think in the real world, especially if it is negative. They hedge and try to be politically correct at all times. If they don’t like a concept or idea they will use a hundred words to tell you that instead of simply saying “no, I don’t like it.” What a waste of time!

I admire the transparent language quality in some of the wonderful people I’ve been privileged to know in South Dakota and I think this quality has a lot to do with small-town values in a can-do American past. Often when I am speaking with my friends from Blunt and Pierre, I notice these almost breath-taking moments of pure, unadulterated truth in which they will express some crystal clear ideas, simply stated, with very little elaboration. When I hear these expressions I understand how I sound to other people and it makes me proud. For example, one of my mother’s old girlfriends might say to me, in casual conversation, that this past winter in Pierre really got on her nerves, because it seemed like it would never end. I am sure that is exactly right. Why elaborate with unnecessary verbiage. Why not just state the truth, simply and clearly? We speak, then we get on with our business. I find that just makes life easier. Or, how about this, there is a very old shop on Missouri Street in Pierre that sells flowers and plants. It’s name: The Pierre Flower Shop & Greenhouses. Love that! No “Best Buds”, no “Fleurish”, no “Bella Fiori” (which is, by the way, grammatically incorrect in Italian). The Pierre Flower Shop & Greenhouses. Done. You know what you will find there and that is all you need to know.

I feel very fortunate that I had the opportunity to grow up in a community where I acquired the ability to notice what was happening around me and was taught to comment on it in a simple, straightforward manner. I absorbed this talent from the people around me every day. When people say I am like a “breath of fresh air”, which actually happens pretty often, I simply say thanks, but I can’t take any credit; it just all came from Blunt.

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.