Listening To Corn Grow: My Childhood on a Nebraska Farm

On the Cover: Always ready to travel, I perched on the bumper of Grandpa Fred and Grandma Gertrude Brinkmeier’s beige Plymouth, a big, fancy car with whitewalls and a Venetian blind in the back window. They parked it along the side yard of our Nebraska farmhouse during their visit from Missouri.

To order books, go to www.listeningtocorngrow.com

The first edition of Listening to Corn Grow: My Childhood on a Nebraska Farm was published in 2020 in Omaha, Nebraska, USA

ISBN: 978-0-578-82010-1 © 2020 Marilyn Hoegemeyer

Marilyn Hoegemeyer, writer and publisher Christine Zueck-Watkins, designer James Fogarty, Legacy Preservation LLC, Peg Meier and Ingrid Sundstrom Lundegaard, editors

Listening to Corn Grow: My Childhood on a Nebraska Farm was typeset with Alkes, designed by Plamen Motev, Nikolay Petroussenko, Kaja Słojewska and published by Fontfabric.

All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced without the permission of the author. Unless otherwise noted, images are courtesy of Marilyn Hoegemeyer.

Printed by Automatic Printing Company, Omaha, Nebraska First Edition, Second Printing

For my sons, Stephan Becerra and Joshua Becerra

“Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.”

— Oscar Wilde, Irish author, playwright and poet

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

— Gabriel García Márquez, Colombian novelist and screenwriter

For all my life, I have been carrying around memories of my childhood on our farm in Nebraska and stories of my school days in our nearby oneroom country school. Friends and family, especially my sons, Stephan and Josh, have listened patiently as I described some moments, both ordinary and some “can’t believe you survived” that!

Now, finally, in 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic requiring “stay safe, stay home” isolation, these memories, these stories are written, recorded as I remember them.

These memories are mine alone. That is worth noting. Others who were present and experienced the same moments might remember them differently. Certainly these memories have mattered in my life. They have shaped me in great measure, made me who I am. When I wondered if I was simply succumbing to nostalgia for life in the past, it helped to read Nebraska author and poet Willa Cather’s words: “Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”

My aim here is to present reality — as I experienced it. I have used the real names of all those who influenced my growing-up years. I have tried to honestly describe my blissful, but also sometimes, fraught childhood living on a Nebraska farm and attending District 16 in the 1940s and 1950s.

—Marilyn Hoegemeyer

Aerial photo, circa 1950, and map of our Hoegemeyer “river farm.”

MAPS BY SALVADOR BECERRA

PROLOGUE

It was mid-afternoon and 110 degrees when I was born in an Army hospital in Wichita Falls, Texas, on Saturday, July, 15, 1944. No air conditioning in those days. No fans in that Army hospital “delivery room.” I weighed 8 pounds, 6 ounces. First baby. My 5’2”, 120-pound mom managed. And she only mentioned it a time or two as I grew up!

During those years of World War II, all materials and goods went to the war effort. People donated their iron skillets, scrap metal including tin cans, food from their “Victory” gardens and fabric. So, it wasn’t surprising that there was no baby bed to be found for my arrival. My parents, Leonard and Carolyn Hoegemeyer, did what other new parents did: They emptied out the bottom/largest drawer of their “chest of drawers,” lined it with a blanket and pillow case and that became my bed.

When he heard the story, my son Stephan teased: “So when night came, they just closed the drawer up until morning. That explains a lot of things, Mom.” His brother Josh concurred!

That was my beginning.

In 1945, when Dad was discharged from the Army Air Corps, he, Mom and I moved to the farm in northeastern Nebraska where my Dad was born and raised. It is there that I took first steps to the barn during milking, rode Dad’s pony, Patch, around the farmyard, shook mulberries from a tree with Grandpa Chris Hoegemeyer, heard the strong winter winds rattle my bedroom windows, saw the beginnings of life and how death comes, sometimes unexpectedly. It is there that my character was forged. I learned to be responsible, resilient, resolute.

Facing page: My early introduction to a cornfield — Grandma Emma and Grandpa Chris, holding me, soon after we arrived on the farm after World War II.

For a time, after World War II, Chris and Emma Hoegemeyer’s son, two daughters and their spouses all returned to the Hoegemeyer farmhouse. Here, left to right, Emma Hoegemeyer, Lillian Hoegemeyer Hawks, hidden, Carolyn and Leonard Hoegemeyer and I enjoyed a chicken dinner at the kitchen table. Grandpa moved out of the way of the photo, which was taken by Bob Hawks.

The farmyard was my playground. It provided security and was protected by our grove, a double row of Austrian pine trees that were hand planted along the north and west of our place by Grandpa Chris and Grandma Emma soon after Grandpa built the farmhouse in 1916. Dad, as a boy, watered each tree to keep them alive and growing during the 1920s and the dry years of the ’30s.

The grove protected us in winter from snow blowing horizontally at 50 miles per hour from the northwest. And from violent summer thunderstorms that bent those pines, whipping their long, pin-sharp needles, making them howl in the wind. But those pines didn’t break. They were always there, keeping us safe. Dad would walk out beyond the grove to see if rain clouds were moving in the right direction to bring much-needed moisture, to watch for a sky with green-tinged clouds that could bring hail or to gauge whether the weather report on the radio was accurate.

The rest of the world beckoned beyond the grove.

To the north, fields of blooming alfalfa, bright green oats and deep green corn stretched for miles, interrupted only by roads a mile apart, laid out by early surveyors of the Nebraska prairie. Here and there were other farmsteads — a house, a red barn, a granary, corn cribs, hog and chicken barns — often protected by their groves of planted trees that helped shield all who endured the cold winters, hot summers and the always-present Nebraska winds.

To the west and south, the land gave way to tree-lined 90-foot bluffs that dropped down to the Elkhorn River, which flowed east another 40 miles to the Platte River and into the Missouri River. There were freshwater springs that gurgled from those bluffs below our farm. They fed an oxbow lake in the bottomlands where large cottonwood trees, whose flickering leaves, bright green in the spring, then yellow in the fall, made sounds in the wind like distant lapping water. There were elms and willows, mulberries and the occasional bur oak and black walnut. They created a haven for wildlife — deer, coyote, fox, beavers, hawks and cranes, raccoons, skunks, opossums, muskrats, red squirrels and jack rabbits.

Just two miles east, the land dipped down to the valley of Logan Creek, which in the spring became a fast-flowing tributary of the Elkhorn River. The 2-mile-wide valley lifted into hills that continued east for 20 miles, all the way to the Missouri River. These lands had long been tended by the Omaha, a tribe that met and welcomed Lewis and Clark along the Missouri River in August of 1804 as the explorers and their crew made their way west to the Pacific Ocean. Lewis and Clark called the Omaha people “Mahar” and noted that the name Omaha means “those going against the current.” Today the Omaha reservation runs along the Missouri River about 60 miles north of the city named for them. It includes the beautiful undulating hills that extend to the bluffs and the river below.

I ventured beyond our farm’s grove on my own for the first time when I was 3. It’s my first memory. From kindergarten to 8th grade, I walked the mile and a half from our “river farm” to and from our one-room country school, District 16, just as Dad had. I imagined mountains in the giant cumulus cloud formations that floated in the bright blue Nebraska sky. I saw rivers in the ripples of heat waves on the gravel road ahead of me.

I’ve yearned to travel all of my life. And I have — to South America, to Asia, Europe, all over North America. Still, the 20 acres of never-plowed prairie land in the Logan Creek bottom, part of Great Grandfather Casper Hoegemeyer’s Nebraska homestead, is dear to me.

My grandchildren, growing up in Omaha and in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the 21st century with all its technological tugs and pulls, patiently explain over and over to me how to create a new computer file, how to save photos to the Cloud, how Instagram and TikTok work. They roll their eyes when I once again forget and say “supper” for what they call “dinner.” They can hardly imagine my childhood with only a radio placed high on top of the refrigerator and, on the kitchen wall, a wooden telephone, metal mouthpiece in the middle, a receiver with a long cord hung on a hook on the left side and a crank on the other side to ring up neighbors on our 13-party line or to call “central” for long distance.

Especially for you, my inspiring grandchildren, for Sebastian and Salvador, Isabella, Angelina and Magdalena, here are my stories.

I am in my pajamas, sitting with Grandma Emma in a rocking chair, just before bedtime.

BY BOB HAWKS

PHOTO

PATCH

It was a day when Grandpa and Grandma Hoegemeyer had come to the farm to help. They came from their home in Fremont at least once a week. In busy times, they came more often. They also spent a day or two a week at the Rasmussens’, their daughter Alice’s and her husband Ross’s farm, across the Elkhorn River from ours.

It was an early summer day. I was 4, nearly 5. Grandma and Grandpa were both working in the garden that spanned the area behind the garage, between the grove of pine trees and the hog yard. I was riding Patch, Dad’s pony when he was a boy. He was a beautiful gentle horse, chestnut brown with a black mane and tail and a circle patch of black on his left rump. Grandma had helped me put his halter on and led Patch to the fence so I could climb on barebacked. Grandma went back to the garden and I rode Patch around the farmyard, daydreaming in the sunshine.

As I led him between the water tank and the barn and down toward the garden to show Grandma and Grandpa how well I could ride, suddenly the hogs came running and “huffing/snuffling” out of the barn, startling Patch and me. Patch reared up and I fell hard onto the ground.

The next thing I knew, I could hear Grandma’s voice, so gentle, saying “Easy, Patch. You’re all right.” She lifted my leg, which was caught in the reins and when my leg was clear, Patch, quivering with fright, raced away to his barn stall. But he hadn’t moved an inch until Grandma freed my leg. Then she turned to me and said, “Stay still. You got the wind knocked out of you.”

Facing page: Standing with Dad’s pony, Patch, who was gentle and let me ride bareback. I’m wearing a flour sack dress, made from fabric that feed and flour was sold in during the 1940s and 1950s. This one had tiny yellow flowers and green leaves. Mom and both grandmothers made clothes for me and my siblings.

PHOTO BY BOB HAWKS

I remember that I couldn’t breathe for what seemed to be a very long time. Then gradually, I did catch my breath and Grandma helped me sit and then stand. By that time, Grandpa had come running from the garden and Mom from the house. But I was OK. Grandma had saved my life. And so had Patch.

As a boy, Dad often rode Patch to grade school, the same one-room country school we attended later. Then he would send him back home with a pat on his rear and Patch would trot home, get a drink in the water tank and go right into his stall in the barn. Such a wonderful animal; he lived to be 40 years old, very old for a horse. He wasn’t just a riding horse, though. Patch was teamed up with Maude, one of our two work horse teams. They were smaller and more docile than Tom and Queen, but did their share of work on the farm. Maude died first and so Patch was retired to just giving rides, including down to the pasture to bring the milk cows up for the night’s milking.

I was already away at college when I heard that Dad found Patch one morning, unable to get up and breathing hard. He came in after milking with the news. He asked Mom to make the call. Then he changed into “town” clothes and left in the car. Mom didn’t ask where. Dad couldn’t be there when Patch was put down and his body hoisted and taken away to the rendering plant. I was glad I didn’t have to be there either.

Facing page: Ready to take Patch for a ride. PHOTO

BY BOB HAWKS

DUCKLINGS

The summer of 1949, we got a lot of big rains, always welcome in Nebraska. Luckily, we also had ducks that summer! Mom had driven me, Ann and Tom over to Wilma Hoegemeyer’s house west of Scribner in late May to pick up six little ducklings that had hatched a week or so before. We three were going to take care of them.

In the backyard, we had a 2x3-foot metal box with air holes and a small opening with a sliding metal door so we could close it up at night to keep out fox, raccoons or a possum. Two low metal feeders were nearby and a large gallon jar that you filled with water, placed a glass saucer on top and turned it over quickly, so the water would trickle out into the saucer, then set it down on the ground. Mom helped and we learned what to do. That first day we held the ducklings, one by one, and dipped their beaks into the water dish so they’d know how to get a drink. We always did the same each spring with the 200 baby chicks we got from a hatchery in town. Those chicks looked like tiny yellow puff balls, nestled in cardboard boxes with air holes. They had their own brooder house north of our farmhouse.

After our ducklings ate and drank some water that evening, we shooed them inside their little box and closed it for the night.

Several weeks later, the ducklings were really growing and getting some feathers. We chased them around, they quacked back at us. Tom, a little over a year old, sometimes caught one around the neck and kept trying to dip its beak in the water again. We told him to stop it. They already knew how to drink. But he liked doing it, he learned not to squeeze so hard, and he couldn’t catch them very often so we sort of gave up on getting him to stop.

But we loved feeding them and watching them as we played in our sandbox and took turns in our rope swing that hung on a nearby mulberry tree.

One night, I forgot to chase them into their little house and close it up. They were getting their full feathers and were almost too big to fit in there anyway.

It rained during the night. Dad said more than 3 inches when he came in from morning milking. The ditches were full of water. And when I went out to check on the ducks, they were gone. All six. I looked all around the yard, in the garden, under the pine trees. No ducklings! I went running in to Mom, so afraid a fox or something had carried them off and killed them! I started to cry.

Ann, left, watched as I filled a feeder for our ducks, some white, some brown, that we raised one summer in our backyard. Note the small metal shed with air holes and the metal barrel just beyond the fence where we burned trash.

Dad came in and asked “What’s the matter, here?” “The ducks are gone. All of them!” I said in tears. Well, where did you look? All over, I said. So he went out and looked with me. No ducks. Then, he got an idea. He put on his boots and grabbed a gunny sack from the basement. Stay here, he ordered, when we got to the garden. He walked down to the end, climbed over the fence and disappeared below the hillside.

Then, suddenly, I heard quacking. More quacking and pretty soon Dad appeared at the fence, climbed over it, carrying the gunny sack full of ducklings. Now, get some feed out, so they’ll have a reason to stay here, he said. I filled up those feeders to the brim and then we got those ducklings out of the bag. They ran right to the feeders, quacking all the way.

Where were they? I asked Dad. They followed the ditch full of water through the garden and down to the first terrace. They were having fun swimming around, flapping their wings and ducking their heads in the water. We’ll have to make them a pen out of chicken wire so they won’t run away again, he said. And he did.

GEESE IN THE FARMYARD

The original hissy-fit creatures were the five geese we had in the farmyard for a few years. They were taller than a girl of 5, beautifully white with bright orange beaks and feet. Watching them from a distance was entertaining. They moved together, seemed to have great conversations, bending their long necks down and chortling along as they pecked at seeds, the gravel, whatever seemed so interesting on the ground. At any unusual sound, their necks rose up in unison, turning one way, then the other to discover what had disturbed their concentration.

But you couldn’t walk around outside the fence without them moving rapidly toward you in a group, necks stretching out ahead of them, hissing loudly and spitting their anger at you. Why? When you were walking to the machine shed to find Dad, helping Mom get the bucket of corn and oats from the granary and hauling it over to the chickens, they moved toward you in a threatening way! The geese got their feed, too. And water. Treated fairly. But they just thought they owned the whole place. Bossy. Didn’t want you walking around THEIR farmyard.

I think we got them because Grandma Hoegemeyer thought some new, goose-down pillows would be nice. We didn’t just go buy new pillows. We bought the goslings that grew into the geese that grew the down that we “harvested” from the geese. (I don’t remember that happening. I must have been in school!) Mom and Grandma sewed new pillow ticking and then the washed-and-dried-in-the-sun soft down was stuffed inside.

Maybe that’s why the geese were so mad all the time. They knew they’d have to be plucked for their down. It probably hurt and made them cold until new down grew in. Anyway, eventually, we must have had enough down, because the geese ended up stuffed and on the table. Some fine dinners. Honestly, I was never so happy in all my life.

ALMOST A ‘LEFTY’

As I told you at the beginning, I started life sleeping in that bottom dresser drawer. It may have affected me more than I like to acknowledge, even though Mom and Dad did not close the drawer at night!

But in that vein, Mom told me, after I was an adult, that when I began to feed myself, Dad watched me closely. I was holding the baby spoon they had made by bending a regular teaspoon around to form a “handle” I could grasp. I picked it up, repeatedly, with my left hand. Dad, very carefully and gently, repeatedly took it from me and had me hold it in my right hand. He thought being a “lefty” would make life more difficult. No one in his immediate family was left-handed and he didn’t want a child of his to be either. None of my younger siblings ever had to be “persuaded” to be right-handed. Just me. And that also may explain a lot of things.

Eating with my right hand, as my Daddy taught me!

PHOTO BY BOB HAWKS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

These memories of my growing up years and my one-room country school are mine alone, but I must thank, particularly, my siblings, Ann Jarrett, Tom Hoegemeyer, Susan Stenberg and Nancy Witte, for their willingness to help me recall details about our family, our farm, our lives.

Ann remembered the fabrics Mom used for her navy sheath dress and overskirt, for example, and helped me recall our close calls as we did chicken chores, gardened, canned and mowed together. Tom told me how high the river bluffs are, how many gallons of water our large cement holding tank held and confirmed the size of the corn nursery, how many rows of inbred lines were planted there and many other actual facts. Susan provided recipes of Mom’s, helped remember all the quilts she made and shared a copy of the “Grandparents Interview” form that Dad and Mom completed for her daughter Julie’s school project. Nancy identified the names of the piano pieces Mom played for us, described the special features of her backyard swing set and found the icing recipe that Mom used for angel food cake in the Dodge County Extension Cookbook.

My sons, Stephan Becerra and Josh Becerra, encouraged me to write about my childhood, even though their own childhoods meant surviving their mother’s long work hours, learning to help cook, do their laundry and keep the household going, plus tolerating my insistence that each year as we walked through the animal barns at the Minnesota State Fair they had to correctly identify the cattle and milking cow breeds before we walked on to the Midway. Both helped with technical assistance, getting photos converted to j-pegs and changing individual files into a book format.

Their father, Jorge Becerra, charmed my grandmothers with his Old World manners, bowing respectfully and kissing their hands when they met, and he loved the contrasts between my childhood in rural Nebraska and his in Montevideo, Uruguay. My second husband, Pete Hohn, who grew up in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota, lived his whole life in Minnesota, except for his World War II years in the Marine Corps. He worked for decades on his own family history and encouraged me to write my family’s stories and my growing up memories.

Sons Josh, left, and Stephan helped with pig chores on the farm of family friends, Maurice and Kathy Hamelin, in France. Josh was on his first solo trip around Europe that summer and Stephan had been studying French in Lyon. They met up at the Hamelin’s for a reunion, good fun and good food.

Stephan Becerra and his wife, Virginia Cabezas.

Josh Becerra and his wife, Sonia Ellis.

Cousins Ruth McMaster, Jan Belohavy and Nina Kavich helped with details about their parents, Ross and Alice Rasmussen. Ruth loaned me her Dodge County history books. Lee Hawks got details about the plane his father Bob had when he flew us back to Nebraska from Tulsa. Kathy Hawks told me what her mother Lillian told her about working on the Manhattan Project. Bob Hawks wrote about his memories of delivering corn with Grandpa Chris.

There are many other relatives and friends who have encouraged me and recounted anecdotes and facts, helping me remember. These include: Joe Couch, Bill Couch, John Paschal, Lucia Orth, Marsha Lafata, Sara Hoegemeyer, Jan Ortmann, Lorrie Hoegemeyer, Kris Henn, Lynn Shultz, Kathryn Rink Dostal, Delores Lhotak Diedrichsen and Ruth Diedrichsen, who told me how to access the online files of the Scribner Rustler and Hooper Sentinel newspapers. Eileen Wirth and Deb Hansen Trivitt gave me advice about publishing this book. Grandson Salvador Becerra created the maps of our farmstead and the nearby roads and locations of my family’s Nebraska roots. During a trip to the port city of Bremerhaven, Germany, Grandson Sebastian Becerra found Great Grandfather Casper Högermeier’s name on the computerized ship’s log from 1869 when he left for America. Sebastian also took the prairie photo on the back cover. Granddaughter Isabella Becerra encouraged me by doing her own writing every day, while granddaughter Angelina Becerra has continued to roll her eyes at “supper” and reminded me to be sure to include the “snake” stories, and Magdalena Vázquez said one day I should write about the rest of my life.

Finally, two dear friends both suggested I needed a map and helped me make this book a reality: Ingrid Sundstrom Lundegaard, who edited and re-edited these stories and helped choose the photos that best illustrate them; and Peg Meier, author of many fine books about Minnesota history, who, over the years, marveled at my childhood experiences and kept encouraging me to actually write down my stories. Her questions, organizing, editing and understanding of what makes a story worth telling have guided my effort. And she came up with the book’s title.

Omaha, Nebraska

December 2020

Marilyn Hoegemeyer

Grandsons, Salvador, left, and Sebastian Becerra

Granddaughters, from left, Isabella (Bella) Becerra, Angelina (Gigi) Becerra and Magdalena (Maggie) Vázquez

Marilyn Hoegemeyer is standing in 20 acres of never-plowed prairie land, part of her great-grandfather’s 1870 homestead in northeastern Nebraska. This book is a collection of her memories growing up in the 1940s and 1950s on the family’s nearby corn-breeding farm and attending a one-room country school. She still loves the sweet smell of prairie hay.

PHOTO BY SEBASTIAN BECERRA