ANOTHER CONVERSATION WITH 2 CHURCHWELL COUSINS
ANOTHER CONVERSATION - TWO
CHURCHWELL 1ST-COUSINS
Craig and I enjoyed an RV trip
through New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado in the Spring of 2022. In Colorado, we were able to meet up with two
of my cousins, Ed and his wife Janie, and Bob, sons of my Uncle Richard
Churchwell and his wife, Viola; we met at a restaurant in Limon. They grew up on the family farm East of
Colorado Springs. Their mailing address
was the town of Simla, their phone number was out of the town of Ramah. I remember Uncle Richard telling stories
about how hard either number could be to find if the person was looking in the
wrong town.
Bob, Ed and Janie shared stories of
growing up in Eastern Colorado, and life on the farm. I’ll use the same format as in my previous
post which was also an interview. I have
a topical heading, then the conversation will be BOB: ED, etc.
PENICILLIN AND BARBED WIRE
Their brother Everett had rheumatic fever as a child and took penicillin every day for many years
ED: That was just the drug of choice back in those days. It’s like, we joked, I probably didn’t see a doctor until I broke my wrist when I was 5th or 6th grade. Any time we got sick, Mom would just give me one of Everett’s penicillin. (laughter)
BOB: That would heal you up!
ED: Yeah, that was the drug of choice in those days.
CRAIG: For us it was erythromycin. My mom worked at a doctor’s office, and whenever we got sick she’d just bring us home a couple of antibiotic pills. Or tetracycline, that’s what it was.
ED: You ever remember going to a doctor?
BOB: No; well, I remember I had to take some type of shot, and I don’t even know what that was for, I think it’s just because I was skinny and they was trying to put some weight on me or something, but I remember going down to Limon, down here at Limon . . .
ED: Dr. Schropp.
BOB: Yeah, Dr. Schropp, and I remember that Mom, grabbing me by the arm and pulling me in there, because I knew, and then, course I’d stiffen up, and that shot hurt so bad, every time, and they’d give it to me in my cheek, and then they’d put it in my arm, I hated that. That’s the only doctor I remember ever going to.
ED: I remember being at a farm sale down south somewhere and Sue Golding and I – I think I was, I don’t know how old, I think I must’ve been 5 or 6 years old - Sue Golding and I, we went to school at Alta Vista together – I remember running around and I hit a barbed wire fence right at neck level, flipped me over, next thing I wake up and Dad’s looking over me, and blood’s coming out, and oh, just put a gauze on it, or whatever, and away we went.
JEAN: We went to your dad’s funeral, I went out with Al and Kim, and we got out, I opened up the car door and there was a piece of barbed wire about 18 inches long and I have old pictures of Uncle Glenn herding cows up on his horse, really cool, old black and whites and I thought, I’m putting that in a shadow box with them, but I flew in, how am I going to get barbed wire home in my suitcase? So, I took all my clothes out, I took the lining out of my suitcase, there were two bars in the back, so I put it under those bars, put it all back in there, and I flew home no problem. (laughter) Craig’s like, you are out of your mind, for a piece of barbed wire!
CRAIG: Well, if that would have popped on the – especially since she tried to conceal it.
BOB: Well, that was in this book that Jan was reading, too. She said they are finding that those kids, the young children that were a part of that, too, I mean, they were with their parents, their parents were doing this – moms and dads and everybody – and really did some psychological things to them, watching those rabbits get clubbed and beaten, and psychologically it screwed them up really bad.
BOB: My oldest son . . . we had some friends out north of town, down there in Burlington, and they raised rabbits. Well, they raised the rabbits for food, and so, they called one time and said “do you guys want to come down and help us butcher rabbits?” We hadn’t ever been involved with anything like that, so Jan & I, we loaded up Clint and Ryan and we go out there, well, we pull up in the yard and you could just hear all this squealing and everything. Well, they have these rabbits tied to a clothesline with their back legs, and just every strip of wire on the clothesline had these rabbits hanging on them and these rabbits are just squealing and then, to butcher them they just take the [rigger?] and slit their throats and just let them drain out then on the clothesline.
ED: And that got to you?
BOB: Clint can’t do anything with rabbits today. He doesn’t like rabbits, he won’t be around rabbits –
JEAN: He probably has nightmares from that!
ED: One of my favorite memories was doing chickens with Mom. She’d take those live chickens, take a 2 x 4, stick their head down underneath that 2 x 4, and yank on them suckers. I always got a kick out of the wintertime when there was snow on the ground cause then she’d throw them up in the air those headless chickens would be flopping around, blood going everywhere and I’m going holy cow –
JEAN: I’m too much of a city kid, I couldn’t do that!
BOB: Most everybody else used an ax or a knife or something like that, but no, not mom, she’d take a 2 x 4 and she’d put her foot down on that head of the chicken and just pull. (laughter)
JANIE: That’s the way my mother killed them. I remember my mom doing the same thing.
ED: Don’t mess with Viola!
CRAIG: Gee, the only thing I was exposed to was when it was time to do the branding, and emasculating the bulls, and the cows, bring those things through -
JANIE: Ed just did that last weekend.
JEAN: We were with Harold, yeah, Harold and Mom; Derald and Kim were out there with the boys.
CRAIG: Harold was emasculating, Derald was branding – no, Harold was branding, Derald was emasculating –
JEAN: No, Derald was branding –
CRAIG: Oh, that’s right –
JEAN: Cause he bumped Harold one time, and Harold jumped! (laughter) Derald laughed so hard. He bumped him with the handle end, but Harold just -
CRAIG: and I was vaccinating, so just kind of an assembly line.
ED: Yep, helped do about 200 of them last Saturday. Yeah, those boys, well, I’ve got a guy that, he’s got about 200-head cow/calf operation, he’s above me, and my neighbor below me has about 25 or so, so their old – well, Tommy’s younger than I am – but old cowboys, they still do it on the horses, rope the hind legs and then they’ll drag ‘em in there. I have no skills, my only skill is dropping on the damn thing, holding it down while they do everything else.
CRAIG: Yeah, Harold had one of those cow squishers, you know, tilt table.
BOB: I don’t think sheep was a part of the –
ED: No, I don’t remember, we had everything, well
JEAN: So, all I can figure is it was calves, so it didn’t sound like cows to me. But sheep, you know, and I think that probably was the exact wrong thing to say to a cattle rancher. Now, did he raise beef or did he milk?
ED: Both.
BOB: Both, but while we was being raised he was pretty much dairy.
ED: He was dairying until I – what year was it, ’67 – we’ve got the pay bill.
JANIE: Oh yeah! 1967 I think.
ED: Cause the house burned down about 1965, no,
BOB: It would’ve been before that -
ED: it would’ve been ’61, ’62. Cause I was about 4 years old, and I remember I was in the house when it started the ceiling on fire, walked in the kitchen and the whole side of the house was on fire and I was in my underwear, and I remember, it was dead of winter, and I walked out to, we called it the milk barn-
BOB: Cause mom always cleaned up after dad had gone to work.
ED: Mom was out there milking or doing whatever, and of course, good old mom, course being 4 years old she didn’t know anything, first thing she gets on me, she just starts railing on me about being out in the cold in my underwear, like I would normally have done that on any other type of deal! And I said, finally, you know, good old mom, she just kept railing on me, hell, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise, I just said, “Mom, the house is on fire!” She walked out of the milk barn and the sucker’s going up, and course we don’t have a phone, I think Lambs saw it I think from across the road and called it in and shoot, by the time the fire department got up there –
BOB: Well, and then even when they got there we didn’t have enough water; they used all the water in their fire truck that they had and we had no pressure at all to be able to fill their fire truck back up.
JEAN: What caused it?
BOB: Electrical.
ED: They determined electrical, I mean, it was a shack.
BOB: It was; Everett still today talks about out there on that old porch, he’s say, “All I remember of my childhood waking up in the morning and being on that top bunk.” And I think Ervin and I, I think, slept on the bottom bunk and Everett was on the top bunk, and he said, “I’d have to shake the snow off of my blanket.” He said, “The snow would just sift through the rafters.” It was just kind of a built-on porch, it wasn’t part of the house, and I’m sure it wasn’t put together well.
JEAN: Wasn’t insulated, or heated.
ED: We took baths in the old style; had a great big old stove right in the middle of the room, and we had a bath tub, it was just a tub that mom would bring out, and we would once a week or whatever –
BOB: I think every Saturday night.
ED: She would heat up water and pour water into that bathtub and that’s – that’s probably why I’m the way I am, cause I was the last one and I got the dirtiest of the bath water, cause she didn’t clean it out.
JEAN: That’s what they say about the whole “throw out the baby with the bath water” is it would usually be dad and mom and then each of the kids until the baby and the water was so dirty you might throw the baby out you can’t even see them in there!
BOB: The only thing I remember – I don’t know whether it was dad’s side of the family, mom’s side of the family or what, but it was Saturday night, we had to take our baths on Saturday night, and those people were still there, and mom made me take my bath in front of that stove, in the living room, sitting there. (laughter)
ED: Yeah, there were only three rooms –
BOB: And here all these people are walking around visiting and here I am sitting in the tub like “Oh my goodness!” (laughter)
JEAN: Is there no respect! (laughter)
JANIE: Had to be old enough to know you thought it was embarrassing.
Richard Churchwell family, 1966
JEAN: Well, there was one time, I don’t know how old I was, we were getting ready to go out to your house and we had just gotten up the hill on Meade Street from our house and the car caught on fire. And I was little, I don’t know, maybe 9, 10, I was young, and dad made me take off my shirt so he could put that fire out! (laughter) Thank you, very much! Luckily, mom had a sweater and she put that sweater on me and we walked back home and got dressed. And I’m like, “Jerk! (laughter) Take off your own shirt, it already had holes, he had cigarette holes all over his clothes! Whatever!” (laughter)
JANIE: Now days, if a car catches on fire, by the time you get the kid out of the carseat –
BOB: Your car’s gone!
JANIE: Yeah!
ED: You were asking earlier about that, yeah, dad had a small-time dairy but the reason I remember that is we’ve got a sale bill, Everett brought one over to us, his buddy is married to the banker’s daughter and Jack was telling Everett one time, when they built the new bank, they were going through some of the archives of the old bank and they found these sale bills of when dad sold out his dairy farm, and he had, I think there’s 50-some cows, he had named every one of them. Every one of those cows was named, it wasn’t just like it is today it says, you know, 57-head of heifers, you know, every cow had a name!
JANIE: “Betsy, heifer.” He had it all listed out.
ED: So, anyway, that’s how I remember is they sold out then, and then that’s when he went, probably, was he working at the elevator then, or –
BOB: I don’t remember him working at the elevator, the only thing I remember is Nichols.
ED: Naw, he worked at the elevator with Buzz Green for a few years.
BOB: Yeah, now that you say that I do remember that.
ED: He worked at the grain elevator in town, because he never did, I don’t think, make anything ever farming, he’d always just do it as a sideline. That’s the same with his cows – then he raised some calves and cows –
BOB: It was more of just a hobby-type thing for him.
JEAN: Well, and then your mom, did she always work in the nursing home? Was it after you guys were kind of raised up, or –
ED: No, she started working at the nursing home, I was still in school –
BOB: I don’t think I was still in school when she was working there, I don’t think. She may have started down there like when I was a senior in high school.
ED: You wouldn’t know because you weren’t home.
BOB: Oh, bull!
ED: No –
BOB: Well, yeah –
ED: Cause you lived with –
BOB: Yeah, I lived with Gordons, south of Limon.
ED: He was a farmer south of here.
BOB: That was another thing everyone of us boys, Everett started working for them, and he worked through the summers, because they had a dairy farm and then they had 1500 head of chickens farm, and so they sold milk and eggs and Everett started working for them, and just as Everett was graduating or leaving home Erv was right at the right age so he went to work for them, and then I went to work –
JEAN: Passed the baton to you –
BOB: You worked for them, didn’t ya?
ED: Yeah, one summer. They had the dairy - they didn’t have the dairy they had the damn chickens. If anybody ought to be fed up with chickens and not eat chickens it oughta be me!
BOB: Everett and Ervin never lived with them –
ED: You lived with them.
BOB: They just worked for the summer, but yeah, I lived with them –
ED: And I lived down there in the summertime because I don’t think I was even old enough – that was the problem with me, is I didn’t turn 16 until I was a Junior in high school, so I couldn’t – I had to stay down there and I never really got a full-time type of job, but yeah, they did chickens when I was down there. There was 2 or 3 big chicken houses?
BOB: 3, and they had all – they were all on the ground, so you had to gather the eggs by hand out of the –
ED: And all the cotton-pickin’ hens pecking at my hand, and then you went and candled them.
BOB: Yeah, that’s why I stayed down there because I was – I would get up in the morning and I would bottle-feed calves; and Grace would be milking, Raymond would be throwing hay to the cows, and then as soon as I got the bottle babies done I’d go to the house and get ready – well, I’d gather eggs, then I’d throw them in the washer and Grace would end up finishing that up, I’d go to the house to get ready for school and drive about 3 miles to catch the bus, cause they wouldn’t come out of the district, so I’d drive over and catch the bus, and then when I came home – school would get out and I’d come home – the first thing I had to do was gather eggs, so I’d gather all those eggs, take them down and put them in those washers, clean them, while the eggs were being cleaned I’d feed the bottle babies, then they’d be done and we’d go in and eat supper and then I’d go downstairs the rest of the evening until I went to bed sit there and candle eggs. (laughter)
JEAN: Oh, I figured you were gonna say do homework! Homework had to be in there somewhere.
BOB: Well, that’s why I – Jan was going through some stuff the other day and found one of my report cards and showed it to me and she said, “I don’t think we probably oughta show this to our children, should we?” (laughter) Straight Ds all the way!
JEAN: Wow!
BOB: Oh, yeah.
JEAN: Well, yeah, now that makes sense.
BOB: But that’s, I mean, I didn’t do any homework at night, whatever I could get done at school that day I got done and at night I’d go home and I’d sit there and I’d candle eggs until it was time to go to bed.
HEIFERS
AND CHICKENS
JEAN: Now, what is candling eggs?
BOB: It’s a little can that’s got a lightbulb in it, and you stick the egg on and it’s got a little hole about so big around that light shines through, you set the egg on that hole and you see whether there’s blood or anything in there.
ED: You don’t want to send an egg to the store that has a baby chick in it. Some people get a little. . .
JEAN: Yeah, I think I got one of those once; I shook it, and no, garbage.
CRAIG: If it’s been fertilized.
BOB: Right, and so then you would just put that on the side –
ED: You weighed them, too, didn’t you?
BOB: Oh, yeah.
ED: They had different weights and stuff, three different sizes –
BOB: Small, large, extra large or medium –
JEAN: Sure, just like when you go to the store and you know which one to get.
CRAIG: The ones that were fertilized, would you put them back?
BOB: Well, I would put it over in another bin, a carton and she would use them, she would cook them.
JEAN: Cause she knew the store wouldn’t –
CRAIG: I mean, if you would’ve kept them warm or whatever, that would become a new chick.
BOB: Well, yeah, if you would have incubated it.
ED: Too late, by then it was too late.
BOB: They would always just buy chicks, I mean –
ED: That was the most beautiful place, though. A typical dairy farm, big red barn and the white chicken houses off to the side; beautiful, but it was out in the middle of nowhere, south of here. No neighbors around. That’s what always got me, I was always down in that basement in the afternoon candling those eggs, course being like 15 years old, every little creak in that old house, you’re going, holy mackerel, what kind of killer is coming after me now?! Course, I had a fairly vivid imagination anyway.
BOB: Every year he would linseed the roof of the house, I don’t remember doing the barn ever. But he would use that stupid linseed oil, and in the summer months why, he had kind of quit doing a bunch of farming, so I didn’t drive tractor like Everett and Ervin did, but he would put the rope on me and he’d pull the tractor up next to the house, and so then he’d tell me, “Okay come on, and he’d measure that rope to where – and that linseed oil was slick, I mean, if you stepped on it, it was slick. And he would measure that rope to where it would just be right at the base of the house in case if I fell; and I did different times, I would step on that stupid linseed oil and I’d slip and fall and I’d slide down that roof, the pitch like this, and the old rope would catch me just as I (laughter)
JEAN: There you are, swinging!
BOB: And I’d turn around and I’d pull myself back up (laughter)
JANIE: And you didn’t walk off!
BOB: Yeah! (laughter) But those two old people, they were old I thought when I worked for them, and I don’t know how many years they lived after, I mean, Grace just passed away I think, three years ago.
ED: He lived to be 99 I think. But, he was a hard-working man. She was maybe 5-foot-nothing, just a wind could come up and blow her away, but I tell you what, she was a working fool.
BOB: Every year they’d get first-year heifers to replenish their herd. The heifers would have their calves and then you’d have to –
ED: And we’d have to pull them.
BOB: Yeah, we almost always had to pull them, but then they’d have to bring those heifers into that milk barn, and course you know how that was, the cows were up here and she was down here, and of course there was a walkway up there, and Raymond would take that lariat and he’d wrap it around the cow’s flank up there and run that rope over that (?) and then, course, first time Grace tucked one of those old milkers up that heifer would go wild. I remember one night Raymond was ready and she had her hand down here and that heifer came up, before Raymond even pulled on the rope, and she hadn’t put the (?) on and caught her hand and she was standing on her hand. And Grace was saying, “She’s on my hand!” And of course I was down there, and she always wore those rubber gloves and it had slit that rubber glove and blood was just going like this, and I hollered at Raymond, “She’s standing on her hand!” and Raymond flipped that rope down, course the heifer was going down, you know, and he was just pounding on that heifer just to get her to lift her foot off of Grace’s hand, and Grace is, “Oh, don’t hurt her, don’t hurt her!” (laughter)
ED: She was a tough old farm woman, God bless them.
BOB: Yeah, they were good people.
ED: Yeah, cause I don’t ever remember working with Dad. We always worked for other people, we didn’t work for Dad. Well, for one thing, he didn’t have enough really to keep us that busy, but he wasn’t the funnest person to work with.
BOB: Well, I always kind of held a grudge, because there was enough for Ervin and Everett because Dad, I remember, was like, “Okay, Everett and Ervin you go out and you clean out the manure out of this part of the barn, or whatever,” and so they were always out throwing manure in the manure spreader and then taking the manure out and spreading it; “Bob, you stay in with Evelyn and clean the house.” And that used to just drive me, but he didn’t have, like you say, he didn’t have enough for three of us to be out there, so it was a God-thing that we got to go out there.
DEAD CALVES, HAROLD’S FARM
BOB: Because I thought, “Oh my goodness, how could you do that” -
JEAN: To cut a calf out like that, yeah.
BOB: Well, even just the odor of a dead calf inside the cow for that long of time, the odor was just horrible, plus to have to just go in and cut it and get it –
JEAN: Cause I was always afraid they’d hurt her, that they’d puncture the uterus, you know, with that saw in there. I was just concerned about the mother, the calf’s already gone, can’t do anything about that.
ED: Now that you mention that, I kind of remember Harold and Calvin and dad and all those guys talking about that.
JEAN: Well, and it’s just so funny between the connection between Mom and Harold, and your mom, you know, that kind of shirt-tail relationship, and how Harold found out when my dad died, and then he waited a few months before he contacted Mom, and then they got married, and she said, “I can’t move back out there.” She said, “I have bad memories, I can’t move back out there.” And we were like, Mom, that’s his whole life, he doesn’t know anything but cattle. You can’t expect him to move into Denver. So then finally once she started coming out then I think the good memories came back and she enjoyed it. I was very glad that she did, and I enjoyed it.
(Let me explain the shirt-tail relationship between Harold NUTTLEMAN and Viola (GRISWOLD) CHURCHWELL. You may recall the blogpost about orphans and Viola’s story told there. Viola’s mother was first married to Daniel WYMAN, and they had 5 children, one of whom was William WYMAN. William married Harold’s older sister, Gladys NUTTLEMAN. All of these families lived near one another in the Washington County farming community. My uncle, Richard CHURCHWELL married Viola GRISWOLD (her mother married Edwin GRISWOLD after her first husband died). Either Harold had visited Richard and Vi and found out that my dad had died, or Gladys, had visited and found out, then told her brother. )
BOB: I remember going to that place out there, either once or twice, it would have been a family get-together. And to me, as a kid, that was the most beautiful place that I’d ever seen.
JEAN: Oh, Harold’s place?
ED: Oh, Yeah.
BOB: I just always thought, “Oh my gosh, how pretty is this?”
ED: That big old red barn.
JEAN: Well, and Mom, once she really got into it, then she got into the pride of it; they painted the barn, they painted the house, and I think the foundation used to be – maybe it used to be red and they painted it green, I don’t remember, but anyway, really spruced up the house.
BOB: I just remember, when you pulled in there off the road, and oh, these people must be rich! (laughter)
JEAN: Well, and you could see the barn off of (Highway) 36, that was the other thing.
ED: I remember, I think one day your mom washed my pants, cause one time I came out there I was on my motorcycle, I think for some big shindig going on, and I thought, “Oh, I’ll ride the motorcycle,” and just got down to Last Chance and it started raining, course back in those days I didn’t know anything about raingear, and rode all the way into there –
JEAN: That dirt road in the rain!
ED: I think I asked your mom, I don’t know if it was my shirt, I think it was my pants. She must’ve given me some of Harold’s overalls to wear. Well, this was a bright idea, wasn’t it?
BOB: Well that’s like one of Raelyn’s customers, he came a few months ago; he came into the house, and Jan was there and his beltloop was broke on his pants, she goes, “Brandon, your belt loop’s busted.” He goes, “Yeah, I know, I’ve been meaning to pull that off.” She goes, “Well, I would sew it for you.” He says, “You would?” She says, “Yeah.” He just took his pants off right there, had his boxer shorts on and threw his pants to Jan, walked down to Raelyn. Raelyn says, “What are you doing?!” “Well, your mom’s sewing my pants.” (laughter)
ED: You might be a redneck if . . . (laughter)
We had to end our conversation due to a storm blowing in. It was great to share so many memories of their parent’s farm and of Mom & Harold’s farm.
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