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TI: So, Virgil, I want to switch gears a little bit here. You mentioned your father was, was pretty smart, and I wondered if you can give an example of your, of your father kind of using his brains in terms of farming. Were there any innovations or anything that he did that, while he was a farmer?

VW: He was, he was kind of a... I don't say he was a leader, but he did, he was an innovator. For example, we had what you call low marsh ground, and you couldn't plant anything in it because it was always too wet in the spring. So my dad used to go to Purdue teaching in the evening. Purdue used to come and have farming sessions and teach people how to, or make suggestions and so on on how they can improve their farm. And so my dad always went, always went, and he wanted me to go, too, which I did sometimes. And he found out that if -- we had a creek that ran through our farm, and the creek was between, right in between the marsh grounds. And my dad learned from listening to people and so on that if you dug this ditch deep, it would drain the water from the marshland, and then you could plow this marshland and raise corn. And you wouldn't be bothered with a lot of water in the spring. And you had to plant the corn at least by May the 20th or so, 15th, something like that. So they're probably planting corn right now in, yeah, in many areas, at least in Michigan, I don't know about here. But then he tried to get all the other farmers, he had to get all the farmers signed up. And we used to go to farmer after farmer and I was driving, of course, I was fourteen, something like that, by then, and I had my driver's license. You could get a driver's license when you were fourteen then. And we went farmer to farmer to farmer and he'd talk, try to talk 'em into allowing -- I think each farmer had to put in so much money in order to have that ditch drained, (dug) through, whatever you want to call it. Finally, when I, I can't remember, I was out of high school already, and my dad finally got permission from all the farmers to dredge that ditch. They dredged the ditch, and he used to dig, we used to, in fact, I used to help him, we used to dig little ditches, maybe about two, three feet wide. Not three feet, two feet at the most. And it'd go to this creek. And so with those draining ditches, along with a big ditch dug out deeply, pretty soon you could get a bulldozer in there and he had, he had them plow it. And then we planted the corn in it, and we raised a hundred bushels to the acre just like that. No fertilizer or anything, just right on that soil.

TI: So it worked. So by, by dredging that creek bed or creek and making it deeper, it would drain the water faster.

VW: Yeah. And so all the other farmers were happy that they had done that. But it was my dad that really pushed it. But he knew. He seemed to know that it would work.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.