Thursday, January 7, 2010

Farmer, soldier, musician: Fiddlin' through life

by Clarke Davis

Wendel Sales plays a violin that once made a trip west on the Oregon Trail and back in a covered wagon.

He knows that because it belonged to his grandparents who made that trip during which his father was born in that same wagon at Bellvue, Idaho, in 1891.

His grandfather was a lumberjack, but Oregon failed to meet its promises and the family returned to Jefferson County.

That fiddle along with a couple of other instruments would provide many years of enjoyment for a grandson not yet born, not to mention some needed spending money during the Great Depression.

It would be a rare individual who lived in this community during the 1930s who did not dance to that fiddle in one of the many barn or house dances held on a weekly basis.

Wendel was born in 1916 to James Thomas “Tommy” and Lottie Sales. From his mother, who played the organ and could read music, he learned to love music. From his father, a farmer and butcher, he learned thrift and hard work.

Tommy Sales loaded his scalding vat, lard kettle, sausage grinder, and meat saws and moved from farm to farm during the winter months to butcher hogs for people at a penny a pound. That $3 for a 300-pound hog saw the family through hard times and provided income until spring field work opened up.

Wendel was born three miles north of Ozawkie. He would attend school in Ozawkie, seventh and eighth grades at Swabville, west of Valley Falls, and graduate from Valley Falls High School in 1934.

He rode a horse to school in Ozawkie those first six years — a bittersweet deal he made with his father he still remembers all too well.

“He said he’d buy me a pony if I got a hundred on my spelling test,” he said.

Wendel got the perfect grade and he got the horse, but it’s a case of not having read the fine print. The small pony turned out to be the orneriest critter he ever knew. If it wasn’t trying to buck him off it was running away with him.

He couldn’t remember how many lunch boxes he had to toss off because something inside would start to rattle and startle the pony. He didn’t go hungry, however. His grandparents lived in Ozawkie where he could get a noon meal.

Following the recent snow storm, Wendel remembers some hard winters but can’t put a year to any of them. Some were in the 1930s.

“One severe winter the coyotes would eat the ears off a calf while it was being born,” he said. “We lost a half dozen.”

Someone suggested leaving empty shotgun shells lying around the pasture where the cows were with the belief the smell of gunpowder would keep the coyotes away.

“I had to feed the steers while my dad fed the hogs and it had to be done before 7:30 so I could get to school,” he said. “I remember the heat rising off the ensilage those cold mornings.”

In later years with his wife teaching school near Nortonville, he remembers she had to wait and follow a snowplow to get home.

When he started high school at Valley Falls he could drive the family car and often picked up some of the neighbor kids on the way in. The main road, however, which at that time ran west from the northwest corner of town was nearly impassable during bad weather, so it was often back on horseback. A resident to the north of the high school had a barn where he could shed the horse for the day.

After graduation he sold a team of horses his father had given him for his labor and bought a 1929 Chevy coupe. He was working for his dad and hiring out to neighboring farmers whose names included Hamon, Ferrell, Reichart, Clare. But Saturday nights he rolled that coupe into Holton to play for a dance where he got paid $1.50.

“You have to realize that in those days you could get a hamburger for a nickel and three gallons of gas for 50 cents,” he said.

The first instrument he bought was a mandolin. He bought it with money earned as a first-grader hauling water to the threshing crew.

“I learned how to chord and Mom would tell when to change,” he said.

Two brothers would be added to the family, enough to make a small band. Minford was six years younger and Calvin was seven or eight years younger.

During Wendel’s high school days the family lived at Half Mound where their barn substituted as a Saturday night dance hall. The brothers provided the music and when they played together they would each net one dollar. He was given the fiddle in 1930 that made that trip to Oregon.

“There was nothing to do in those days, so people loved to come out to these dances,” he said. “A lot were held in homes where we just rolled back the rugs.”

There was always plenty of drinking around those barn dances but Wendel never drank.

“I couldn’t afford it,” he said.

The answer to keeping them sober was to keep them dancing, he said. “If you let ’em sit around and talk people would drink more.”

Drinking in excess was not tolerated, but he can’t remember booze being much of a problem.

“Someone who drank too much would be escorted out,” he said.

Tommy Sales acquired his first tractor in 1937, but Wendel was still hitching up a team trying to make his own stake. He told of Ed Keen having a small patch of land on the west side of Half Mound that needed clearing.

Wendel cleared the timber and with a walking plow, a walking lister, and a one-row, horse-drawn drill planted the three-acre patch to corn.

“After hand-shucking the crop, he handed me $50 for my share,” he said. “I thought that was pretty good money.”

Barn dances and fiddle playing would soon be a memory for Wendel, who was born during World War I. By the time he was 25, America had another big war on its hands and farming gave way to learning how to fire 105mm Howitzers.

Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941 and by the next March Wendel was at Pearl Harbor training with Battery B of the 52nd Field Artillery of the 24th Division. He spent the next 3 1/2 years in New Guinea and the Philippines fighting the Japanese, cholera, and yellow fever.

He recalls one quick pit stop in Australia.

“We weren’t there long, but I remember a small pub that only sold beer and hard liquor. I had a $50 paycheck and spent 25 cents for a beer,” he said. “I was never anyplace to spend the rest of that money until the war was over.”

It’s not combat Wendel most remembers, but rather another farmer he observed in the Philippines with a caribou pulling a wooden plow through a rice paddy.

“He must have known I was interested, so he beckoned to me and let me run the plow while he steered the caribou,” he said. “It was a flat, tapered wooden plow made from a tree limb, but it worked just as good as our plows.”

His war service was recognized with an Asiatic Pacific Service Medal, a Philippines Liberation Ribbon, and a Bronze Service Star for carrying wounded while under fire.

One can learn of this man’s modesty and his humor from an interview by his grandson Kyle Johnson for a school project in which Wendel was quoted as saying, “The hardest one to earn was the Good Conduct Medal.”

Back home, he returned to farming in partnership this time with his brother Calvin.

With the money he had saved during the war — nothing to buy except that beer — he purchased a tractor, plow, cultivator, and a lister.

He would marry his wife, Georgia, a career teacher, in 1948. They would move into his parents’ house at Half Mound and later to a farm house south of the Coal Creek Church. The partnership with Calvin would last about a dozen years. Calvin now lives in Topeka. Their other brother died at age 67 in a fishing accident.

The banjo and fiddle playing continued when he got home for a few years, but things began to change. Television and better times put an end to the barn dances.

“The music got loud and rock ‘n’ roll came in . . . that was pretty much it for us,” he said.

An accident with a calf that broke his left index finger caused him to put away the instruments for 30 years. The finger never set right and is too stiff to finger the strings. He didn’t think he could play.

It’s only been a half dozen years ago when he was gathered with some friends drinking coffee at a local station that someone encouraged him to try again.

“This person told me he knew someone who had lost a finger but he adapted and kept on playing,” he said. “So I tried it again and I’ve learned to get by.”

“I tell people to learn from that example and whatever it is they do, don’t ever give up,” he said.

Wendel and Georgia raised two children, Daryl and Cheryl. He has five grandchildren. He lost Georgia to cancer in 1994.

After attending Kansas State University, Daryl chose to come home and join his father in the farm operation he had been developing since the war.

“He calls me his silent partner,” Wendel said, “and I guess that’s what I am. I told him to make his own decisions, that I wouldn’t boss him.”

They have an Angus cow-calf operation. Along with baling up some prairie hay, Wendel harvests clover seed. Their cropland is farmed by the Miller Brothers.

Today Wendel resides in a comfortable home in Valley Falls with Cheryl helping with the housekeeping. He spends time with his fellow Rotarians and plays a weekly gig with area musicians.

He’s not enamored by new fangled things but after a double-flat tire episode on the farm during which his family couldn’t find him, he’s been forced to carry a cell phone.