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Ripley Roots |
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Ripley
Genealogy Moschel
Genealogy
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Aren't We Having Fun! by theresa m ripley, daughter Blanche Margaret Phillips Ripley
Mom spent a lifetime being a teacher, a good teacher. She had one year of training at a normal school in the mid 1920's. Her formal teaching career ended after seven years in 1934, turning to marriage, farming, and raising two kids. Nevertheless, she rarely lacked students in her adult life. At Mom's funeral a student from the 1930's said he was a teacher far ahead of her time as far as instructional techniques. She took her young charges on field trips and used everyday situations to teach them the 3 R's, the former student said. On the same occasion two of my high school classmates reminded me that, "Blanche got me through Algebra." I had forgotten. She also tutored me and two other friends through Latin taken by correspondence. We took the course, encouraged by Mom, because our high school did not offer foreign languages. She tutored me in almost every subject I studied through age 18, including catechism and 4-H projects. In addition to teaching, Mom was a farmer. Dad was captain of the crops, my mother and brother were lieutenants, and I barely made private since I left at age 18. Mom's role in the farm operation, in addition to bookkeeper and loyal helper, was keeping everyone's spirits up. This was a great challenge because we had old equipment, distant landlords, and increasing physical limitations of the prime crew. It was during tough times that Mom was at her best. I have visions of her unloading the corn. The process started when Ray brought the wagon full of corn back from the field where Dad was harvesting. The corn that did not go to the Ocoya Co-op Grain Elevator was stored in our crib. The task at hand was to get the corn from the wagon into the various compartments of the upper part of the crib, which was about the same height as a three-story building. The needed machinery to do this job was an auger which would tip the wagon and a conveyor which carried the corn to the top of the crib. Ray started by putting the front wagon wheels on our antique auger which would lift the front end of the wagon so the corn would go out the back. Mom, kneeling at the back of wagon, was stationed next to the conveyor. After starting the lift process of the wagon, Ray hops into the trailer with a shovel to give a manual assist. Mom, still on her knees, opens and tries to adjust the gate at the back end of the wagon so the corn will come out in an orderly fashion onto the conveyor and up into the crib. That, at least, was the theory. In reality either the wagon gate, the auger lift, or the conveyor would break (or sometimes all three). The worst scenario would be the wagon rising too fast, the back gate sticking open, and the conveyor stopping. Mom is then bombarded with hundreds of ears of corn. She tries to stop the onslaught with two small, gloved hands. After the corn is picked off the ground; and it makes its way into the crib, she looks at Ray and says, "Aren't we having fun!" and for a moment we were. Mom raised chickens and had an egg business. This brought her "egg money." Mom thought chickens were dirty, and I agreed. The season started with buying the new chicks and putting them in the brooder house. Some chicks, like some kids, always get picked on; and those chicks came into our house and stayed around the furnace. During lambing season they usually shared the space with a newborn lamb that Mom had delivered at 3 a.m. and brought into the house. My room was right above the furnace so, "cheep, cheep" and "baa, baa" were the usual sounds of a spring awakening. Mom's business partners were 400 White Leghorn chickens. Being a chicken, I discovered, can be very dangerous. Those chickens that graduated from the brooder house went to the hen house. It was not an automatic graduation, and Mom lost many of her business partners. First was the pecking problem. The initial remedy for that was hanging strips of liver from the ceiling of the brooder house so the chicks would have something meaty to peck besides each other. The bloody failures from that effort came inside. Those chicks that did not get pecked to death were subject to coccidiosis. As a kid, I loved that word and tried to find ways to use it repeatedly. There are not a lot of opportunities to use coccidiosis in everyday speech or writing. Coccidiosis was a big killer. I can't remember Mom could do much about it except put something in the water. Those that survived coccidiosis (gee, 4 uses in 5 sentences) were moved to the hen house. The chicken business is a lot of work. Those chickens that had successfully lived through chick life still took hours of daily work. The routine in the hen house was feed and water twice a day, and the rest of the time the business partners were suppose to be devoted to laying eggs. Mom was good at culling out her poor producers. It was a touch technique under the chicken's belly that confirmed a good layer. In addition to feeding and watering, cleaning out the hen house periodically was the purview of Dad and Ray. You can imagine the scene if you have 400 chickens cooped up in one building all the time. Putting down fresh straw was the last step in this process. It was a very smelly job. The most important daily job was gathering the eggs. Mom went out with a bucket and came back with dozens of eggs. She said it was better to do it at least twice a day, three was better, so you would lessen the chances of cracked eggs. With 400 layers count yourself how many eggs there were. Getting the gathered eggs from the bucket into the egg cartons also involved a series of steps. We didn't have equipment for cleaning, grading, candling, or boxing eggs. This was all done by hand, Mom's to be specific. She did this job in our basement which was only four-feet high, but it was cool in the summer. In the winter the eggs were usually tended in the house. Her dress for this job, and most others, was usually the same. It consisted of a homemade dress (usually out of feed sack material) that was collarless and very plain. I think she used the same pattern for years. In this outfit she cleaned, inspected, and packed eggs for hours. It was, to say the least, a shitty job. I had to be bribed to do it. Mom was also responsible for selling the eggs. In today's world we would call it marketing, and Mom did a good job of it. At first she sold her eggs to Callahan and Jones, a local wholesaler of farm dairy products and eggs. After a period of time, Mom decided she could do better on her own. Because our driveway went right out to the legendary Route 66, we had thousands of cars whizzing by our farm daily. The issue was how could one get them to stop and purchase Mom's eggs. Mom's solution was to obtain a 4-foot high billboard picture of a rooster (god knows where she found it) and nail it to a piece of plywood on which she hand lettered her message: "Ripley's Eggs--Believe it or Not." The sign went at the end of our driveway, right on Route 66, and for years we rarely had to sell our eggs to Callahan and Jones. The egg business brought a steady stream of regulars and one-time buyers to our door. It was rare for a day to go by without a buyer stopping at Ripley's, believe it or not. About half of our customers were from Chicago, which was 100 miles north. Many customers took 30 or more dozen eggs at a crack. Mom knew they were reselling them, but that was alright because she was making a fair profit, too. One of my favorite customers was a woman from Chicago who baked fruitcakes commercially. She stopped year round, but at Christmas time she would come several weeks in a row and get dozens and dozens of eggs. We always got plenty of free fruitcake from her; unfortunately, none of us liked fruitcake. Mom's customers also became her friends, and she knew every customer's family members and would often knit surprise gifts for them. "It just goes with the eggs," she said as they protested when they paid for the eggs. The customers remembered Mom in return. Mom had great difficulty in getting enough egg cartons. Many a customer would stop, not even wanting eggs, to drop off scores of egg cartons they had saved for her and also had asked their neighbors to save. Mom rarely met a person who did not become a friend in a very short period of time. This included all of her neighbors in the area as well as the Chicago customers who, in lifestyle, were much different than the woman they met on the farm. So what did Mom do with the egg money? She bought many things for Ray and I, but in later years the money was earmarked for trips. Mom always wanted to travel. For a person who had never been more than two states away from Illinois she had a passion for wanting to know about far away places. She was curious about people, places, and things; and travel was her fondest dream. She loved everything about travel: anticipating it, doing it, and recalling it. In fact her anticipation and recall hours much exceeded our actual travel. During my early years we spent five days every summer at the Wisconsin Dells. For short trips, there was not a state park within a day's drive we had not seen twice, often taking one or two cousins along with us. Savoring the trip planning during the deepest snows of winter was her special joy. She made road logs, trip books, picture books, and read everything about where we were going. When I was in my teens, we managed three trips out West, all compliments of egg money. These included trips to Mt. Rushmore, or "the faces" as Mom called it; Yellowstone Park; Black Hills; and one long trip out to the Pacific Ocean. These trips were all well recorded and hour upon hour was spent looking at the books and slides and even discussing the expense records kept. Even though Mom never particularly liked chickens, I note that one of her favorite books was The Egg and I. She, too, could see the humor in her life with the chickens. Mom's last year was a major challenge to a person, who for no reason, would enter a room and say, "Happy, happy, happy!" The year was 1977. Dad was in and out of the hospital and a nursing home several times from January to June. Mom and Ray had put in the spring crops with exhaustingly long hours, combined with daily hospital or nursing home visits. Dad died in mid July. When I was home for the funeral, Mom said, "I want to come out and see you on August 14. I want to have something to look forward to on that day." It would have been their 43rd anniversary. Mom came. It was the first time she had ever flown. "Yes, I think I like flying," she said as I picked her up at the airport. In the week's visit she met many of my friends, and they marveled at this 69-year-old woman talking about going home to bring in the crops. Mom returned to Illinois on August 21 and was met at O'Hare by my brother and his wife. Mom phoned as soon as she got home. She was tired, but so excited. She met a widow on the plane who told her to look ahead, not back. She thought she was ready to do that. During our visit in Oregon she talked about taking a trip to Europe with a cousin and possibly even going to school. During the next week Mom told her many friends and two sisters about the trip to Oregon. I called Mom on the evening of August 27. She was looking at the trip book we had made the week before chronicling her trip to Oregon. She was looking forward to having it this winter she said. "We should plan another trip; maybe to San Diego so I can meet your friends there," she thought. "Yes, we should do that," I said. We said our goodbyes. About eight hours later, at two a.m., the phone rang and woke me. It was Ray sobbing and trying to get out some words. He finally managed to say that Mom has joined Dad now. There had been a fire, the house was destroyed, and Mom was dead. The ensuing months were some of the most difficult I've faced. When I was not absolutely occupied doing something, my mind was in constant motion with Mom and Dad. Would life ever seem normal again? Would I ever sleep through the night again? Would I ever comprehend the enormity of the loss? A new year came, 1978, and I knew it had to be better. Mom's birthday was January 20, and I planned to celebrate it. She would have been 70. Eight months before I had applied for a Fulbright scholarship to Sweden. In the aftermath of two deaths, the application had been forgotten. On that day, Mom's birthday, I received notice that I had been awarded the Fulbright award and a trip to Sweden. Since then, I have traveled, worked, and lived on six continents and become a traveler. Mom would like that. |
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People
often tell me I seem optimistic and happy. Usually I reply, "You should
have known my mom." She personified optimism and was my best teacher on
that and many other things.