In my family, there were four of us, three girls and a brother. Margaret was the oldest; I was second, then Robert and then Mary Louise. We grew up on a farm. My grandmother named it “Grassland Farm”.

Well, we had to mow the lawn the hard way. We had to take care of the chickens. I had rabbits. My father would never allow us girls to be out in the barn because we had hired men. He never allowed us to do that. We had to work in the garden. Mama always had a big garden and my sister did the inside work and I used to do the garden work.

I loved working outside. Oh, we used to play in the old barn. We had a big barn with cement beams. I wouldn’t want my kids to do it today but we used to walk across those beams (Laughs), we had a good time! We had a cement chute where my dad had the feed up above and a chute down to milk cows.

Well, I slipped down through that one day but my brother got caught because he was bigger than I. (Laughs) I was screaming up the house to my mother. By the time we got back Robert had wiggled down. Mom always said I led him into everything! (Laughs)

So, we had pigs but we didn’t have to do much of the farm work. Lots of cattle; my father raised short-horn cattle, and milk cows. We never had sheep we just had the pigs. We were always busy.

My great-grandfather bought 1,000 of acres there, at the time we were there it was 320 acres.