Harold B & Blanche Smith

SMITH EVELETH

Posted By: Connie Swearingen (email)
Date: 10/16/2010 at 23:25:00

History of Woodbury County, Iowa 1984

Harold B and Blanche (Eveleth) Smith
By Blanche Smith

Harold Benjamin Smith and twin brother, Marved Benjamin, were born January 11, 1904, at Climbing Hill, Iowa, to Benjamin F and Minnie Mae Smith. A sister, Altha, was born August 1, 1908. They farmed and the boys walked to country school. During high school, Harold sometimes drove a horse-drawn school bus, and later a motorized bus. Their mother died suddenly on Christmas Eve, 1918, when all efforts by Dr Glann to take her to a Sioux City hospital failed, due to impassable, muddy, and rutted roads.

During the winter months, Harold helped haul corn by team and wagon, to Hornick and Oto, Iowa, and worked in his Uncle Wes Smith’s grocery store, hauling weekly supplies from Sioux City, in a small truck. He hired out for farm work and later to Clark’s Construction Company for forty-two years. Most road grading was in Woodbury and Plymouth Counties, and during World War II, they were at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and prepared runways at Camp Berkely, Texas. Off-season work was at Swift’s, Bishop’s Cafeteria, Cohen’s Wholesale delivery and Sioux City Motor Express. During the severe winter of 1936, he operated a snow plow on the hills of Plymouth County, assisted by a crew with shovels to open the roads. Emergencies included the arrival of a new baby at a hospital. Once when attending Barnum & Bailey Circus, with friends, a violent storm dismantled the tent causing panic among people and animals, leaving drifts of hailstones.

Blanche Elizabeth Eveleth was born October 31, 1908, at Salix, to William and Ida Eveleth. After completing high school, she graduated from the former Methodist Hospital in Sioux City, then doing private duty, until her marriage to Harold Smith, July 22, 1939. Childhood farm chores included milk several cows, operating the cream separator, with five-gallon cans of cream being sent regularly by train to Blue Valley Creamery. Skim milk was fed to calves and pigs. Cream checks plus egg money provided necessities. Beside canning, apples and sweet corn were dried. Fields were kept clean by hand hoeing, and racks of selected corn were dried for future seed. Horses were shod each winter to haul ice for Brown’s Lake to be stored straw in the ice-house. When the bee apiary enlarged to almost 100 colonies, it was maintained by H E Brown & Sons. Farmers dragged the roads, exempting them from paying poll tax. Cottonwood trees lined the Lovers-Lane on the north boundary of the farm. Gypsies often parked there and came begging for food, once coming into the house and helping themselves.

Following church on Sundays, meant making ice cream, and kids contesting for the funny papers to read the Katzenjammer Kids. Horseback riding, sledding, fishing and ice skating on Sandhill drainage ditch were fun. In the 1920s we exchanged our long braids for bobbed hair and marcel waves, short skirts, progressing from cotton to lisle hose and luckier ones to silk stockings. Blanche was one of three pupils in the entire school who wore eye glasses. School was dismissed in the forenoon of November 11, 1918, Armistice Day, pupils rushing home and most everyone congregating in Salix later. Dad installed a siren on the tail-pipe of the old Ford, and Kaiser Bill was burned in effigy, the day ending with a dance at ‘Sen-Avery’ hall –a day of rejoicing and relief, but sad for those who had gold stars in their windows. Nearly everyone had someone ‘across the pond’. Three of ours ere uncles. A tempermental gasoline engine powered washing machine was replaced by an electric model in the 1930s purchased with a small sum plus sacks of potatoes.

In 1943, the Smiths came to help on the Eveleth farm, as a partnership, Blanche caring for her mother. Sheep were and important part of the operation. When a lamb lost its wool, from a high fever, Harold fashioned a substitute cover out of a sheep skin jacket, until it grew a new coat. (A sheep wearing a sheep-skin coat!) He continued with the sheep after the farm was old, and we purchased the building site, where we still reside. Memories of the first moonwalk prompted us to go to the kitchen window, look up at the silver moon, and marvel at what we had just witnessed on television. Unbelievable.