I'm Mary from South Dakota. I've lived in South Dakota almost all my life, almost 90 years. It's home for me.
My dad and mom came here from Holland, but my brothers and sisters and I were born here. I grew up here. I went to school here and taught school here.
I got married here, and raised eleven kids here. I'm a mother, a grandmother, and a great-grandmother.
Photo: Sandy Peters
Today at lunch at the cafe, I suddenly said, “I haven’t had my cup of coffee today, Anne." She’s so nice. She went and got the coffee and poured me a cup, so I got my cup of coffee after all.
I remember Dad always had to have his cup of coffee. He took a quart jar of coffee out to the field. He drank cold coffee from the quart jar. At home Mom always kept coffee on the back of the stove so he could have it whenever he wanted.
Today at lunch in the cafe, we had a cookie for dessert...an oatmeal raisin cookie. It was nice and soft and real good.
Recently, a friend of mine in Dell Rapids that I went to school with said she remembered my mom always had cookies on hand. I remember the big round container she had that always had cookies in it.
I can’t even remember not having cookies. We had sugar cookies, oatmeal cookies, and raisin cookies. She always baked them herself; you didn’t buy cookies in those days.
Speaking of Mom's cookies makes me think of our lunch pails when we went to the old school house.
My brother Ted and I started school together. We
went to all eight grades in this old school house. There was just one
teacher for all the grades. We walked a mile and a half to school every
day.
We
always took lunch pails to school with peanut butter and jelly
sandwiches...peanut butter with apple, strawberry, or plum jelly. We
always had a cookie, an apple, or a piece of cake in our pails, too. My
mother baked one cake a week on Saturday. It had to last for a week.
Photo from Mary's photo album, taken years later
At school, we sat at little desks. To get into the
desks, we had to flip the tops over. Then we had to flip them back to
write on top of them.
There was an average of eight or ten students in school—maybe fifteen at times—and one teacher. The classes were sometimes combined. For example, the seventh and eighth grade arithmetic might be together. You did all the subjects in one week.
At the old school house, we all had duties. We cleaned the chalkboards and erasers and got the desks in order. I helped out by getting drinking water. I took a pail and walked over to the neighbor's house to get water. Then we all drank out of a dipper.
The most fun at school, though, was playing baseball during recess at the noon hour.
Photo: Stormy Peters
View of the old schoolhouse today
There were days...years...that Ted and I didn't miss one day of
school. We had perfect attendance in stormy weather, rainy weather,
whatever. We always walked home together; and when we got home, we did some studying.
He helped me with my arithmetic.
We also had chores to do when we got home. We had to gather eggs, feed the chickens, and help cook meals. We hunted eggs up in the hay. That's where the hens laid their eggs. We were always so happy when we found the nest.
Photo from Mary's photo album
My dad, Emil Brakke, came over from Holland. He left behind his parents, two brothers, and a sister. He didn't come alone though. He came over with two friends.
He landed in Iowa first, and met and married Mom there. He was 25 at the time. I don't know how old she was, but I think she was two years older than he was.
She came from Holland, too, but she had come over with her folks when she was a child. She was like six years old when her mother died and some folks adapted her, or rather just took her into their home.
Photo from Mary's photo album
Mom and Dad's wedding
Dad grew up in Holland and came to the States as a young man. Here are two of my photos of Dad at that time.
In the first one, he's in Holland. He's the one on the right. The one on the left is his brother, Theo Brakke, who stayed in Holland.
The second photo shows Dad arriving in the States. He's on the left in this photo.
Photos from Mary's photo album
My Dad was a good farmer, and we had a good farm. The people who had the farm before us had a homestead. They planted all those trees. They even planted flowers.
You wouldn't know the place now. Nothing is the same. All the buildings have been torn down and the house burned down. Nowadays, even the old barns are going.
The top photo is of Ted, Evert, and Dad on the farm. I'm with Dad in the middle photo and in the close-up.
Photos from Mary's photo album
It never bothered Mom when we had people stay to eat. She had all that canned food—apples, pears, and peaches. On our home place where the farm was, we had apple trees, plum trees, rasberry bushes and strawberry plants. I think we even had gooseberries.
Photo from Mary's photo album
On Saturday nights we used to go in town. We each got a nickel and could have either an ice cream cone or a candy bar...chocolate or vanilla ice cream and a Hershey bar or a Milky Way.
When we went to town, Mom took along a can of cream and a large case of eggs. That was our money. Mom would figure it out so that it all balanced. If she had a little left over, that went for sweets. If the cost of what she was buying went over, she would put something back—the baking powder, coffee, whatever.
Whenever you saw my brother Everet, you saw him sitting in the corner, reading books. He was not interested in sports. He just liked to read.
On Saturday nights, when we went to town, he always went to the library and checked out three books. He stayed there until it closed.
Then he asked Dad to park by a light and would read until he finished the books. He always finished the three books before the rest of us got back.
Evert did two grades the first year and two grades in the second year and graduated when he was twelve.
Photo from Mary's photo album
My sister Agnes was six or seven years younger than I was. I was through school by the time she started. I finished school, but she didn't.
She liked to work in the fields like Mom. Sometimes she traded with Evert, so she could go out in the fields. Evert was happy to trade, too, because sometimes he could sit in the kitchen and read.
Photo from Mary's photo album
This was our first car. Ted is standing in front of it. This picture was taken on what was then Fred Lathrop's place.
Dad drove us to lots of places. Mom didn't drive a car. He saw that we got to do our shopping on Saturday and got us to church on Sunday morning.
He was always the one who took us to the Huron Fair or places like the Corn Palace.
Since he had lived in Iowa before coming to South Dakota, he also liked to visit his friends there. Some Sundays when he went there, we got to go with him.
Photo from Mary's photo album
I remember those trips to Iowa. The men there had a game they liked to play. It was a kind of outdoor bowling a little like horseshoes; my dad had played it in Holland.
I think it was called rollie bollie. There was a stake in the ground, and you rolled a wooden ball to get points. I never played it because only the men did. The women weren't in on it.
I've got to give my Dad a lot of credit. When I went to high school, he let me take the car. I drove a mile and a half to pick up two neighborhood kids, and then we drove to school.
It was the family car, so my Dad was without a car during the time I had the car. I didn't think about it at the time...how generous he was to let me have it.
Dad was easy-going. He liked to smoke a pipe—not cigarettes or cigars. A pipe was his thing. He also liked to play pool.
He liked to go to the Ward cafe. We lived across the street from it. He was always the one sitting there telling stories, making everyone else laugh. He had a brogue to his language his whole life, and I think it made him interesting to his friends who sat and talked to him.
One day my oldest son Chuck bet Hank, the owner of the cafe, a dime that my dad (his grandpa) could stand on his head. Hank was going to win, and Chuck was getting upset, so Dad came and stood on his head so Chuck wouldn't lose ten cents.
Dad also bought Chuck his first bicycle and taught him how to ride it.
Photos from Mary's photo album
My mom, Gertrude Brakke, was a homebody. She liked to read and crochet. She never drove a car; she was content to stay at home and didn't visit or go places much.
She liked to work in the field, picking corn or shocking grain. She drove a team of horses and helped with the milking, milking the cows by hand.
She was always the first one up in the morning. She would start the fires and get breakfast going. She always saw to it that each of us got going. She did our sewing. She always sewed our dresses and aprons.
She liked to can and had a big garden. That was nice. When company came from Iowa, she never worried. She just told us to go downstairs and get beef, peaches and potatos. We always had sauce, peaches, and berries, too. We went down in the trap door to get whatever we needed for dinner.
This is a picture of Mom when she was older.
Photo from Mary's photo album
Indoors we liked to play cards. We played checkers, too. Outside, it was always ball. Sometimes we played horse shoes. And then we played a game where you dug a hole and laid a stick across it. Then we took another stick and boosted it up in the air out in the field and tried to catch it.
Hide and seek was one of our favorites...and a running game called "Pom Pom." In Pom Pom, you'd be on a base. Then you ran off and someone tried to catch you.
In the winter we played in the snow. We had a round circle, and there was a circle in the middle of it. Somebody was it and tried to catch us.
For breakfast, we had pancakes. My dad always had cornflakes and pancakes. We never had eggs or bacon or anything like that...not like people usually eat for breakfast now.
We made ice cream; we didn't buy it. In an ice cream
mixer, you mixed milk and sugar and what you needed to make it. Then
you put ice all around it and turned it and turned it until you had ice
cream.
Mom never made anything real sweet for us—not a lot of sugar ever; and when she baked a cake on Saturdays, the cake frosting was always thin, not thick.
Yet, us kids all had bad teeth. I used to hate those visits to the dentist. They would drill right down and raise you ten feet off the chair.
Photos from Mary's photo album
My dad had horses, but he was killed in a car accident, coming home from Flandreau.
Lots of times, he went there in the winter time. Coming home, one time, alone, he had an accident and his car went off the road. He was found dead.
I didn't see him at the funeral, and I used to think, "What if he didn't really die? What if he came back some day?"
Photo from Mary's photo album
It's strange. Both my father and Joe's father died in car accidents. It happened the same way with Joe's father. He was alone in the car, and it had gone off the road. The car was lying in water in the creek. They said he had a heart attack.
Both out fathers had tragic deaths, but both our mothers lived to be old. They lived to be in their eighties.
In Joe's family, there were two girls—Betty and Kay; and there were six boys—Tice, Joe, Nick, Fritz, Frank, and Charles.
One of Joe's little brothers died as a child in an accident. When we were kids, it was different. At that time, we didn't have refrigerators, so we got chunks of ice from the ice wagon that came to town. When the ice wagon went around town, kids would jump on it to ride around on it.
One day, Joe's little brother jumped on it just as it was going around a curve, and he fell off. He was killed when he fell. The delivery man didn't even know it happened.
Photo from Mary's photo album
Here are some photos of me taken at the old Brakke farmhouse and barn. They were taken in 1984. I think they were the last ones taken.
Photos from Mary's photo album
Years later, this is Joe with our first car. I think this photo was taken around 1938.
Photo from Mary's photo album
Joe and I had eleven kids. Some of them are in this photo....some cousins as well.
Photo from Mary's photo album
That was a day to fish! Fishing is one of the things I like to do.
We were parked on the road, fishing for bullheads. We were getting bullheads, two at a time, on our lines.
I had to stand there and hold them while Ted took them off. At that time, he caught so many fish, I bought a deep freeze.
Ted always cleaned them when we got home. I never had to clean a fish. He sat on a stool by the garage and cleaned them.
Photos: Thomas Peters
I remember the
most fun part of our days at the old school was playing baseball during
recess at the noon hour. I used to join in the kids' games once in a
while, just for a few moments when we lived on the farm.
This is me in town in 1999 with Reece, my great grandson. He's Laurie's boy. He's a really good player.
Recent Comments