Book: Hunting & Horse Trails - from Mongolia to the Yukon
Chapter 4
Indian Creek Stories I Tell My Kids

When I was six years old, in 1939, our family moved to a place called Indian Creek in western Wisconsin. It’s not on the map, but everyone called that place “Indian Creek”. It got its name because the U.S. Army used to meet the Indians there once a year and give them gifts and payments.

They met by a big tree along this creek a hundred feet from the rear of our house. In 1940 some surveyors came through and had to start their survey with this tree, which no longer existed. So they dug down in the ground and found its roots.

My dad was the local Lutheran minister and the church was next to our house or parsonage. My Dad would preach both the German service and the English service every Sunday. You know the Bible was inspired by God and written in Hebrew and Greek, but Lutherans believe that when God talks in Heaven, He speaks in German.

Every Sunday we were invited out to one or another member’s home for Sunday dinner where we ate chicken. It was always some tough chicken that had stopped laying.

There were five of us in the family: my father Frederic, my dear mother Louise, my sister Carole, the youngest, and my brother Stuart, the middle child. My folks always said I had trouble sitting still in church, so they often claimed I was adopted.

After my sister was born, Mother finally relented and I was able to sit in the balcony with the older boys. My Mother had her hands full with her new baby daughter and my younger brother.

The balcony was separated in the middle by a big pipe organ. The girls sat on the west side of the organ and the boys sat on the east side. There was nothing but sweet “peeps” on the west side while on the east side there was continual movement, smirks, and not always too much meditation on the sermon.

The pipe organ was manual with a wooden pump arm that the janitor would stand beside and continually pump. There was an air indicator knob that stuck out of the side of the organ by the hand pump. This air indicator knob had a high mark and low mark on the side and the person pumping was to keep this air indicator between the marks, so that the organ had sufficient air in its bellows and pipes – not too much air and not too little air.

One Sunday the janitor was sick, so one of the ushers asked my friend, Bob Grassman, and me if we would take turns pumping the organ. With a very sincere and respectful nod we indicated in all humbleness we felt honored to have been given this awesome responsibility.

Bob and I did a very good job of keeping the air indicator between the high and low marks for all the hymns.

However, one of the kids in the balcony had shot a squirrel the day before and passed the squirrel’s tail around among the boys during the sermon. The tail got as far as my friend Bob. When he got up from the pew to pump the organ for the closing hymn, he took his shoe lace off and used the shoe lace to tie the end of the squirrel’s tail to the organ pump handle. Bob started out pumping and the squirrel’s tail was bobbing up and down. We boys were all lying down on the church pews with our hands over our mouths and biting our tongues to keep from making any laughter.

After a couple of hymn verses, Bob decided to let the air indicator knob fall below the low mark. Poor old Gertie, the organist, started to really pound on the organ keys to try and make the organ play louder. When there was a wheeze coming out of the organ, Bob pumped the arm real hard and shot that air indicator way above its mark. All of a sudden the old organ was blasting forth with more gusto than the Mormon Tabernacle organ.

Bob did this a few more times for the last two verses and poor old Gertie turned red, either in anguish or anger or both. That was the last time Bob and I were asked to pump the organ. At the next church meeting the congregation took a special collection and bought an electric air pump.

In those days, the church was the center of not only our religious life but also our social life. Our church had a mission festival every summer; there were three services that Sunday with three different guest preachers. There was a big dinner at noon and also in the evening, which was prepared by the Ladies Aid Society.

Not only was every church member there on those Sundays, but also all the Catholic neighbors would go, too. No one locked their doors and another plate was put on the table if you were at a neighbor’s at meal time. Those were also the days before the combine; they were the days of the threshing crews. The threshing machine was pulled by horses or a tractor and it would start at one end of the valley and end up at the other end. While the men were in the fields and around the threshing machine, all the wives were in the hot kitchen cooking for ten to twenty men, twice as many kids and, of course, for themselves. Potatoes, meats, cakes, and pies were prepared over the old kitchen upright wood stoves and the scraps went to the cats and dogs.

Our family always had some cats and dogs around. Out favorite dogs were Snookie and Chips. Snookie was the mother and she was a great hunting dog. In fall, any neighbor who wanted to use her would just drive by the parsonage and Snookie would hop in the rear of their car as soon as they opened the rear door. When the neighbors were through hunting for the day, they’d bring Snookie back.

In those days the Indian Creek area had good pheasant hunting and Jackson County, just to the north, had good prairie chicken hunting. Many mornings my Dad would take Snookie and Chips and they would get the limit for my Dad without him having to fire a shot. Twenty years later my Uncle Henry from Milwaukee would talk about this every time there was a conversation on hunting dogs.

One day Snookie went hunting and didn’t come back. It was two months before the county game warden found her and told my Dad who had appropriated Snookie. A few more months went by and Snookie disappeared again. Everyone thought the same guy stole her again but sold her out of the area.

Chips was not only good on pheasants and prairie chickens but he was fast and agile enough to catch rabbits on the run. In summer he’d catch turtles from the creek and put them upside down on the gravel road in front of the house. Then he would lie in the ditch until a car would go by and run over the turtles. Then Chips would eat the turtles.

A couple of times one of the neighbors saw Chips grab one if his chickens and take off. My dad finally got an old dead chicken and wired its legs around Chip’s neck. Chips couldn’t get that chicken off. That chicken and Chips were inseparable for about a week. When my Dad took the chicken off, Chips never chased a white chicken again.

There was also a local character who was called “Happy Evans.” He had an old wooden shack on a ridge in the woods about two miles away. He didn’t have a horse, a car, a farm, a job or a care in the world. He always sang as he walked down the road. All of us boys wanted to grow up and be like Happy Evans. One early overcast winter day I was with my folks going down the road about 25 miles east of Indian Creek and there was Happy Evans walking west down the gravel road carrying his rifle, singing and waving to us as we drove past.

About a mile down the road on a small, poor dirt farm lived the Hendees. There were about thirteen Hendee kids, from small to big. Three of the older boys would work in summer in the CCC camps. This was the Civilian Conservation Corps. The federal government hired older boys to plant trees and cut brush and fix up camp sites. These three Hendee boys saved up some money and bought a Model “T” Ford. I think it was the first car that was ever owned in this family. These Hendee boys had it about a month and had a flat tire. Either they were broke or just got a kick out of driving down the road with a bare rim on one rear wheel.

The oldest boy fell in love real fast. He got married at noon and was a father at three o’clock.

Mr. Hendee would come and go. He always wore his World War I trench coat as soon as it got cold. He had a bad eyelid that always twitched. When we first came to Indian Creek, my Mom was real mad at him. She thought he was being fresh by always winking at her.

One summer day my brother and I were invited over to the Hendees for one of the girl’s birthday party. We walked over and got there early. One of the girls, Ella, was still mixing the cake batter by hand with a wooden spoon on the round kitchen table. One chicken that was in the house kept jumping and flying up onto their kitchen table. Ella would pull that long wooden spoon out of the cake mix and swing it at the chicken. The chicken would fly off the table and then jump back up onto the table again. Ella would swing again and the chicken would fly off the table onto the floor. Finally one of her brothers, Edgar, came into the house and he chased the chicken out through an open window.

Edgar was 3 or 4 years older than I and he was in the class ahead of me. After some of the other kids came, Edgar told me about a dead horse in the back of the woods. My brother Stuart, Edgar and I went off to see this dead horse. The dead horse was lying on her side with her feet sticking straight out and her stomach was bloated to about twice its normal size. The three of us just stood around and marveled about this horse as if it was the seventh greatest wonder of the world.

A couple of winters after this birthday party, none of the Hendees got around to cutting wood, so they started to go out to the barn and cut a piece off here and a piece off there. Finally the barn fell down. They managed to get their four cows out, but they could only get three cows into the small chicken coop. They took the fourth cow into the house where they had an empty bedroom upstairs. They managed to get the cow up the stairs and into the empty bedroom for the rest of the winter. But when spring came and they tried to get the cow to go down the stairs, the cow wouldn’t go! So they had to butcher the cow upstairs.

All of the kids around Indian Creek went to Rock Edge School. A big sandstone rock ledge protruded out towards the gravel road. There were about 15 to 16 kids in this one room, first through eighth grade. In my class there were three of us, except for one year in third grade. A new 14-year-old kid moved into the area and the teacher put him in our third grade. He wasn’t too bright, but he sure was big.

You could also tell a kid’s socio-economic status in the fall by looking down at his feet. If he had shoes on, he was considered a rich farm boy. If he was barefoot before the snow flew, he was a dirt poor farm boy.

There was a little village a couple miles down the road just past Hendees. It had a few homes, a creamery, a small grocery store, and three taverns. Some of the farmers’ wives were always complaining about how long their husbands took getting milk unloaded at the creamery. I could never figure out why those farmers always parked their pickups in front of the taverns when they were at the creamery all day!

World War II came and my Dad went into the Army as a chaplain. Our days at Indian Creek were ended.