20: Interview with Allen Kingman and Peggy Klingman

Date: April 2008

Place: Allen’s home on the farm close to Chappell, Nebraska

Interviewer: Donita Priefert Payne

Allen and Peggy Klingman lived in Chappell, Nebraska. Allen was a cousin to my father, Don Priefert. Allen’s mother, Mabel Eickman, was a sister to my grandmother, Della Eickman Priefert, and to Edna Eickman Brown. Chappell is a farm community very similar to this Liberal community. I have included this interview in this project as I think the story of this large family and how they survived during the Dust Bowl and Depression years is so interesting and not unlike families in this Liberal community. Recall that Timothy Egan tells the story of a family in Colorado in his book The Worst Hard Time. Chappell is very close to Colorado. The Klingman story has a happy ending while the Egan story of the Colorado family does not have a happy ending.

AK: I am Allen Klingman from Chappell, Nebraska. I am recording this for Donita. I was born in 1921. This is the same farmstead I was born at. Most of the stories you will hear from me will be from this background.

I remember as a boy we planted crops like potatoes and things in the field. We boys were to keep the weeds down. We just hated this job and would do most anything to get out from doing it. We got the potatoes and everything hoed and dug them out and picked them up in the fall of the year. That was our winter supply of potatoes. A lot of the things we raised on the farm was the same way. We butchered
our own cattle, hogs. I remember one summer, in the northwest corner, we broke out a piece of pasture and we planted watermelon and muskmelon in this area. Of course, we had to hoe them out and clean. I remember one time the wind had blown the soil so that it made quite a mound and we had a dickens of a time getting the watermelon to come up but we finally did get it to come up and we did very well. We
had all the watermelon and muskmelon that we could eat. I remember also we had one of our present trees, we had watermelon planted there. It was a little bit early to harvest watermelon but a couple of us went up and sampled watermelon and of course turned it down so nobody could see it. But the moisture would blead the watermelon. My dad always thought that some sucker did this, shouldn’t have
done this. It is one of those things. We had a dickens of a time. We run a couple hundred head of ewes and a bunch of cows. The feed for the ewes was in the east end of the sheep shed and had a circular hole 28 feet deep and we had to take a ladder to go down in there and get it and feed the sheep. We did very well but just did not operate big enough to make any money.

DP: Allen, tell us about your family, how many children there were in the family.

AK: We had three sisters and five brothers – nine of us all together. And then our dad and mom. Mother had to make bread twice a week. She would make the bread, ‘course she would need all the help she could get. The girls would help. I would help along as well. But we made nine loaves of bread a week. Of course, the stove wouldn’t hold nine loaves at once so she would bake it in batches. How she and Dad ever raised that family under those conditions I’ll never know.

DP: Can you remember what it was like during the late ’20s and when the dry years began to set in?

AK: I can’t really recall this ’cause it kind of all runs together. But I remember we were having trouble raising feed for the livestock. So Dad reasoned that by taking a lister and list back and forth across the quarter across the road, not clear down but he listed pretty deep and in the spring of the year he put feed in the lister and went in the same place. Moisture from the winter and stuff would help germinate
the seed. We got along very well this way.

DP: Did you have some crop during those Depression and Dust Bowl years?

AK: We did but it was a struggle to keep the livestock fed. We depended on them for our food. So we had trouble. I remember in the fall of the year we did our butchering as soon as it froze up in the fall ’cause we were hanging the livestock that we were butchering up in the hayloft of the granary after you get them butchered and skinned. You would put a sheet around the carcass as it was hung up and keep
the flies and things off. We did the same with hogs. But this was a job. You would put the hog in boiling water and then transfer it over into a barrel. You could only scald one end of the hog at a time because it wasn’t deep enough. So sometimes we shaved the hair off the hog instead of using the I-forget-whatthey-call-them, to scrape off the hog. [They were called scrappers.]

DP: So during the Depression years you had milk from your cows, your own meat that you had raised, chickens…

AK: Yes a lot of those dumb chickens…

DP: . and your mother baked the bread.

AK: I remember one year we carried 28 sacks of wheat flour up to the storeroom. This was our winter supply of flour. To do this we had to take a load of wheat to town and barter for our flour. I can remember carrying those sacks up those stairs yet. Pretty rough.

DP: So, there wasn”t much cash around in those days?

AK: No, no cash. You had to barter and trade and everything.

DP: I am sure your crops were probably very lean in those years.

AK: Oh yeah. If we had a crop. I remember we’d normally not even harvest but three to five bushel per acre was all that we could harvest -wheat.

DP: A normal production is how much?

AK: At that time, it was 30 bushel. It has gotten better because of the harvesting equipment we use now. We are not throwing over the wheat that we used to.

Peggy: Tell about what your dad used to pull the stuff, the implements.

DP: Were you using tractors or were you still using horses?

AK: We had horses, but I can’t remember much about horses. We mainly went to tractors.

DP: So, you were a teenager during those Depression years?

AK: Yes, and I remember going – one year a storm come up, a dust storm, and we were at school. The wind blew and we could see that cloud moving a”crossed us, so we went down to the basketball court in the basement of the school and we stayed there and played basketball or anything to get our mind off of the fact that it was storming outside. It was tough.

DP: How did your folks clothe that many children in those years when there was no cash available? How did you have shoes?

AK: Well we’d borrow our brothers’ shoes and they would borrow ours and sometimes his pants would be a little high and ours would be a little long. We had two pair of overalls – one pair to go to Sunday School and then after Sunday School we’d take care of them so that we would have one for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and like that.

DP: What was community life like in those dry, difficult years?

AK: Actually, you know the community life was not all that bad. Everybody was in the same boat. We all had helped each other. I can remember one year running a harvest crew. The day they had the wheat all shocked you’d take the trailer, the hayrack out pulled by a couple of horses and pull up to a shock and two or three pitchforks we’d do the shocking and go on to the next one. We did this and made a round
robin so that everybody got their wheat harvested but it was different than we had thought it would be.

DP: My folks were married in 1932. I was born in 1937. I think it was probably worse around Liberal than it was in Nebraska.

AK: Ithink it was.

DP: My mother talked about how she would have to clean house every day, such a tedious thing to have to do. They talked about how they would get together, the people in the community, and play cards all night long. Wasn’t anything else they could do. [Laughing] Did those kinds of things go on here too?

AK: Well, my folks were never card players.

DP: My folks played Rook.

AK: My folks wouldn’t even let us play Rook. We went to bed.

Peggy: That explains why there were nine children. [Laughing] They didn’t play cards, they just went to bed!

DP: Allen tell about where your parents came from and how they got here to Chappell.

AK: Dad and Mother were married in Hebron, Kansas – no, in Chester, Nebraska. They moved every two or three years trying to get a leg up on farming. I remember Dad said every farmstead that they were on they got water for the kitchen the first thing, then after that it was the other things that had to be done. I can’t imagine moving onto a farm and not having water, running water in the kitchen. This place that
we are on now always has had running water. I remember in the wintertime sometimes the float on the tank in the attic that gives us running water here, the float would freeze up, so we’d have water come down all the way, it was quite an experience. Immediately somebody would go out and shut the windmill off and then you’d go up in the attic and try to figure which way the water was going out and
stop that up.

DP: When your parents moved to this place did they build the house?

AK: Oh yes. Dad built this house. He came out in 1919 or 1920 and got a carpenter out of town to build the house. Dad always kicked himself because he should have turned the farming over to somebody else and he should have stood around and watched the carpenter do the house because there are too many places that you look at it and – crooks etc.

DP: Did he ever say how much it cost to build this house?

AK: $500 and some odd dollars.

DP: I remember something about when my grandad built the house at Liberal and the barn. I have heard the $500 figure, $500 for the house, $500 for the barn – stuck in my mind. It is hard to image. This is a good-sized house.

AK: A story-and-a-half. Four bedrooms. Also a storeroom where two of us would sleep.

Peggy: Tell about the family.

Allan: There was nine of us lived in this house until Gale went to college. Florence went to Normal School which in two or three years gave her a teaching credential. When she had finished teaching two years she had met a young man and they were married.

DP: As I recall, all nine of you had college training.

AK: All but Florence and she had teachers training.

DP: Tell about the academic careers and training of your brothers and sisters.

AK: We had nine children, eight had college educations of one nature or another. Most of us, since we were farmers, chose farming as a vocation. We went this way but most of them had to take a job in something else because there wasn’t room for all of us. Harold went to the soil conservation service, Dayton went to college and got a masters and then a doctorate and taught in the university in the science-related field. Glen went to the university as well. Glen was different than the rest of us. He got through college in three years instead of four – he was just this way, he was always impatient, he had to get ahead, get out. He got a doctorate and was teaching for the university for a couple of years. Glen and Phil went to the Navy because of WW2. Phil is my brother-in-law. Anyway, they went to the Navy and when they came back that is when Glen began to get training to teach and do research. He worked for Eli Lilly, taught at University of North Carolina, in Raleigh. Dayton went to the USDA and traveled the world in trying to establish grass, many areas were eroding so bad that he had a dickens of a time getting a start of grass growing. But he watched, and this is what he did.

Peggy: Who didn’t go to Ag college?

AK: My youngest brother, Vern. When he came back from the Navy he wanted to go to university. He went to Denver University which is a training for the ministry. He wanted to be a preacher in the front yard and a lawyer in the back yard. Whenever he got it straight that you couldn’t do both, you had to do one or the other. He had a church or two in Denver and then he went out to Billings, Montana and
finished his preaching there.

Peggy: He has a doctorate too, a Doctor of Theology.

AK: Glen, Dayton and Vern, all three had doctorates.

DP: If you could live someplace in the world, would you choose this, or would you choose someplace else?

AK: Well, I don’t know anything about other places, but I do know this, and chances are that I would choose this again.

Peggy: How about the first place we ever lived together?

AK: Well, that was beside the point. We lived in Hawaii. We were there five years and had four children. So something was wrong with the water. [Laughing]

DP: What did you do in Hawaii?

AK: I was in the fuel maintenance department. The pineapple they would seed it and then it was up to me to grow it until the first crop was harvested and then somebody else would do that. I just was field maintenance all the way. For Dole Pineapple.

DP: Have you gotten free Dole pineapples for the rest of your life? [Everybody laughs]

AK: We went back a time or two and we did go into the field and pick some pineapple, but we were careful to not let somebody see us.

DP: My observation is that farmers have a love of the land and a respect and they look at themselves as having a trust. How do you feel about the land and your relationship with the land?

AK: Yes, I have always felt that I received the land in such a manner that when I get done with the land, I hope it is in better shape than when I got it. I hope it is, I don’t know. Makes quite a difference as to how you approach farming.

DP: Have you seen the farming methods change?

AK: Oh yes, we have gotten so big. The farm, when we moved to the farm, my first disk was 12-foot-wide and a tractor to pull it. It was hydraulic. When I finished, we were using 32-foot disk and a tractor big enough to pull it. It makes a difference. In order to do this, you have to have a lot of acreage to spread the value of your equipment over this many acres. You don’t know whether you are gaining or not.

DP: Have the methods changed for how you work the ground?

AK: Not all that much. In our dry climate here you try to not go more than six inches deep disking. ‘Course by the time you get this done, you turn around and do the next operation. Eventually you end up with the ground this deep and the moisture under this, two or three inches. So you seed the wheat just under the moisture layer.

DP: What is the average rainfall here?

AK: 17 or 18 inches a year. Most generally, in order to get that kind of average you got to have some years that are a lot less. So it is a struggle.

DP: Now that you are retired, who is farming this land?

AK: In 1985 our son, I had always told him that if he got tired of working for Harsh Hydraulics in Colorado, that we’d make room for him here. He came back and said he’d like to come back to the farm. So we said you come to the farm and we will go elsewhere which we did. He has been farming since 1985 and if it gets to where he needs help, I will help him, but he stands on his own feet.

Peggy: In the meantime, you were helping over at the ranch which is down the road about five miles. It is a working ranch. They raise cattle.

DP: Is there anything else you would like to talk about?

AK: I have had a wonderful life. I can’t complain.

DP: You are a wonderful gentleman. I remember seeing you at my folks’. Did you come for my dad’s funeral?

AK: I don’t think so.

DP: I remember you visiting my folks and I remember visiting with you at the Eickman family reunions more than once. Your beautiful wife, Peggy, is a very outgoing, sociable person. I always enjoyed speaking with her. I called on the telephone as I was driving through and you said, “Come on out, stay with us tonight.” So that is what I did. I gave no advance notice. It has been a wonderful evening, a treasured time.

Update October 2019:

Allen died October 2010. His brother, Harold, died January 2002. His brother, Vern, died April 2015. His brother, Gale, has died. This information was found through obituary searches.

My parents, Don and Lowene Priefert, were visiting friends with Gale and his wife. They were farmers in the Chappell area. They were also visiting friends with Allen and Peggy.

Allen’s parents were Mabel Eickman Klingman and William Klingman. Mabel and my grandmother, Della Eickman Priefert, were sisters.
The Klingman family, Mabel Eickman Klingman and William Klingman and children, and my grandparents, Della Eickman Priefert and John Priefert and their children, Fern and Don, were letter correspondents and visiting family when my father, Don, was growing up. There are pictures of the kids playing together on several different occasions.

Update 2020:

An internet search shows a grandson of Allen and Peggy operating the farm and some farm-related business.