Memoirs

Perhaps a small farm in western Illinois is as good a place as any to start a life filled with travel, adventure and accomplishments. At least that’s where it all started for me  on Dec. 16, 1941.

 

Earl Dittmer, my father, was a sharecropper. He farmed 160 acres west of Bowen, Illinois (near Coatesville, 30 miles from Quincy) and shared the revenue from the crop with the landlords who lived in Springfield.  I would travel with my family to Springfield when dad reported on the yield and pay whatever rent/sales from the shared crop there were with the owners of the farm.

 

One of my earliest memories was in October of 1945 when I was is riding in a horse drawn wagon while my father was shucking a field of corn. During World War II it wasn’t easy for a farmer to buy a tractor since all factory production was in support of the war effort. Later I do remember riding in my father’s lap as he drove a Ford tractor down a muddy road in front of my house. 

 

We were self-sufficient on our farm (siblings?) My two brothers, one older and one younger, and I all had our assigned duties. By the age of 12, I was working in the field driving a tractor with a disc or harrow behind it tilling the soil. My dad had us milking cows when we were 11 or 12. We milked half a dozen cows, producing enough milk for the family with some left over to sell. The opportunity for me to grow up with two guys, working side by side with them gave me a lot of confidence and helped me to realize that I could do anything that they could do. 

 

We were surrounded by family who lived in nearby towns or farms. Our family would visit my dad’s five brothers and sisters and his parents and my mother’s two sisters and her brother and sister often. I remember my paternal grandparents, Charles and Clara Dittmer, helping my parents slaughter a hog. The entire animal was used. The fat was “cooked” in a big outdoor cauldron to make soap. The meat from the animal produced hams, sausage, roasts and pork chops. Mother cooked some of the fat to make lard for shortening used in her pies and other baked goods. Like many other farm families of that time, we grew almost all of our food. Mother bought coffee, flour, yeast, baking powder/soda and sugar but our farm provided most of what we needed.

 

I helped my mother clean house, tend to the garden, take care of the chickens, peel endless bushels of peaches and vegetables for canning to see us through the long midwestern winters. 

 

My mother had worked for a family in Quincy, Illinois during her senior year in high school to pay for her room and board. The schools where she lived didn’t offer an art program, so she transferred to study art. Luckily for us, the mother of the family who hosted her was a home economics/nutrition graduate of Monmouth College. As a result, my mother learned a lot about nutrition, cooking and baking from her host family. That knowledge benefitted my two brothers and me as we enjoyed a very healthy diet during our years at home. (did this continue when you left? Favorite recipe?) 

 

My dad was the next to youngest of six. He finished high school but didn’t go to college. My mother not only stayed busy with her farm chores but was keen on us getting an education. She was involved in the PTA and kept a close eye on our progress. Although we attended a small rural high school that didn’t have some of the advanced courses that larger schools had such as calculus, I had caring teachers who were very encouraging and positive. We also go to do everything. I played in the band and participated in sports. I loved to play basketball, swim, play badminton, softball and whatever was available. It offered a chance to be around other people that I didn’t have on the farm. At that time women’s teams didn’t compete against other schools but we had a lot of intramural activities.

 

Travel

 

But life wasn’t limited to school and to the farm and all travel wasn’t by tractor. The train station was like an airport is today with 40 or so trains and many travelers. When I was in the fifth grade or sixth grade, I took the train overnight from Quincy to Chattanooga. I saw my first escalator and apparently my brothers and I were a handful because I remember my mother having her kids on a harness to keep them under control. Our senior high school trip was to Chicago to see Music Man and where I shared an elevator with Johnny Mathis at the hotel.

 

Life on the farm was wonderful but confining so when time came to go to college, I was ready to leave. It was sort of like I retired when I left the farm and went off to college.

 

I attended Knox College, a small liberal art school in Galesburg, Ill. My older brother was a National Merit finalist, so we had all kinds of people sitting around our kitchen table trying to recruit him and I kind of tagged along. The focus today is on STEM but back then it was about Sputnik, the satellite that the Russians launched in 1957. There was a lot of concern that we were falling behind in mathematics and science, so a lot of attention was placed in those areas. I was good at math, and it seemed a natural for me. In a lot of ways, math is like a language (how). 

 

Women were expected to be a teacher, a xx or a xx. As a good student, I was accustomed to helping others, teaching them, so I gravitated to a teaching career. Although neither of my parents had gone to college, it was always sort of an expectation that my brothers and I would attend college. There were only about 20 people in my graduating class, and I’d guess fewer than half continued their education. It was a rural area with lots of family farms and the children were expected to take over the farm and that’s what many of them did.

 

I had a scholarship to Knox but also worked in the cafeteria. We had a good group working there, sort of a fraternity of the workers. I ended up being the head of the cafeteria (and café stories?)

 

A highlight of my college travel was a trip to Chicago in 1959. Some friends invited me there at Christmas time. I’d never been there during the holidays. We went to Marshall Field’s and they treated me to lunch at the Walnut Room. To return the favor, I invited my friends to visit our farm. Some had never been to a farm, but we put them to work gathering eggs and doing other chores. My father was never one to laugh but those neophytes put a smile on his face.

 

Knox also had a more official cultural exchange program where a bus called the Gizmo that went between the college and New York City as a part of an attempt to attract students from New York to Knox. The price was right, and we traveled all night on the bus. I visited with a friend of my aunts who lived in the Village in 1963. She certainly didn’t look or act like any of my aunts and I suspect she probably was a lesbian but whether she was or not was of no major concern then or now. I also visited an orthodox Jewish family at Easter time. I shopped at Lord and Taylors, certainly a step up from the Sears Roebuck shopping I was accustomed to! It was quite a cultural smorgasbord.