10. The Rawie Family Dairy

Velma Carter Rawie: That was where, as I recall. . . it was in that area.

Bob Zybach: So if you wanted to go anyplace with water from Wells, you had to drive someplace?

Velma Carter Rawie: We had to go quite a long.. . There wasn't any other creek or anything big enough to go swimming in.

Bob Zybach: Now, was Bowers Slough...?

Velma Carter Rawie: But that was a slough. It wasn't a creek and it dried up in the summer time when a fella wanted to go swimming.

10. The Rawie Family Dairy

Bob Zybach: Would there be things at the slough that kids would go through, like frogs or would ducks land there?

Velma Carter Rawie: I don't remember. I never did. As I say, the kids.. . When school was out for instance, we had chores to do in the evenings and in the summer time the kids all worked. I mean. . . I don't remember ever lacking something to do. You hear kids now, "1 don't have anything to do." There was always something to do.

Bob Zybach: Would you resent that or was that just the way that it was?

Velma Carter Rawie: No, that was just the way it was. My kids were brought up the same was when we came out here to the farm.

Bob Zybach: Now, where you are living now, you used to farm in this area?

Velma Carter Rawie: Oh yeah, we had a grade A dairy here and I milked cows here until 1962 I guess.

Bob Zybach: Now the Wieses, were they next door to you?

Velma Carter Rawie: They lived up the road, up here on what is Walnut now. You've probably talked to Edna Wiese haven't you?

Bob Zybach: Yeah, a few times.

Velma Carter Rawie: Yeah, uh huh.

Bob Zybach: So, you had a daiiy farm.

Velma Carter Rawie: Yeah. right here? So how many acres did you have? We had a 175 acres here.

Bob Zybach: Huh. What do you think about all of these houses here now?

Velma Carter Rawie: Well, it is different.

Bob Zybach: [Laughter]

Velma Carter Rawie: It is different

Bob Zybach: So your boys were raised on a dairy farm?

Velma Carter Rawie: Oh yeah, so when school was out at night, I never heard my kids at a lack of something to do. On Saturdays there were chores that had to be done. I always said that they would be good business people because they couldn't play until certain things were done so they would inveigle their city friends to come out and help them hail manure.

Bob Zybach: Kind of like Tom Sawyer.

Velma Carter Rawie: . . so that they could play then. They would bribe the city kids into letting them drive the tractor for a little while.

Bob Zybach: Would they play down here in Dixon Creek?

Velma Carter Rawie: Oh, Dixon Creek ran right down here behind us. They'd go down here and catch fish. Ralph and I would drive a hundred miles on the opening of fishing season to go fishing and we wouldn't catch anything and the two boys would stay home with their grandmother and go down here and they'd have a batch of trout for us when we got home. We caught a lot of fish out of our creek.

Bob Zybach: Is there still fish there now?

Velma Carter Rawie: No.

Bob Zybach: What happened?

Velma Carter Rawie: I don't know. There is not much water in it anymore even.

Bob Zybach: What do you think happened to the water?

Velma Carter Rawie: Well, I don't know. We had water rights off of the creek. There used to be a dam in it when we first came down here. We could have irrigated off of it but there wasn't too much water in it. Let's see, this street, Elmwood wasn't in here at that time We had 40 acres on that side of Dixon Creek and the rest was on this side. We went clear through to 10th Street which is Highland Way and then in an L shape up on the hill to where the Lutheran cemetery is.

Bob Zybach: Uh huk

Velma Carter Rawie: 13th street would be where the L goes out. We sold this on this side first and then we started selling the other way down on Highland Way and we didn't sell it

Velma Carter Rawie: all at one time until that got built up. We never developed it ourselves we'd sell it to a...

Bob Zybach: to a developer?

Velma Carter Rawie: a developer. Then when that was used up we'd sell another piece of it.

Bob Zybach: Did you make more off of selling land or selling milk?

Velma Carter Rawie: [Laughter] Much more off of seffing the land but we made it pay as a dairy farm too. My husband worked in town all of these years. He was service manager at the Ford Garage, so I did the milking. The boys did the feeding and stuff in the evening and Ralph did the feeding stuff in the morning and we would always get up at 4:30 a.m. and get the milking done and we'd be in the house by 7:00 a.m. so he could get showered and shaved and dressed up to get to town to work. Before we went to the milking parlor and the stainless steel tank where they come and pick the milk up, he hauled the milk to town in the Wilson Motor's truck as he'd go to work. He'd take the ten gallon cans of milk to the...

Bob Zybach: Oh, uh huh. Would Wilson Motors get upset about that?

Velma Carter Rawie: No.

Bob Zybach: He was the seivice manager he...

Velma Carter Rawie: He could do most anything he wanted.

Bob Zybach: Uh huh.

Velma Carter Rawie: As I say, it was quite an [inaudible]. It was a good life. It was a hard life. We'd change.. . the last time we changed. . . In the summer time we'd change the irrigation at 11:00 p.m. at night and we'd set a flashlight, lantern type flashlight, at the end where we wanted to take the pipe to. We had to change it all by hand. 600 feet of it. Sometimes in the morning it wasn't the straightest line in the world but we would get it across. In the mornings while I was milking, Ralph would go and change that pipe so it would run for another setting.

Bob Zybach: It sounds like he was lucky that he married a tomboy.

Velma Carter Rawie: Oh yeah, it was a family project.

Bob Zybach: Do you think that that was good for a family?

Velma Carter Rawie: Oh, it was wonderful! We worked together. We played together. When the kids were little I'd take them to the field with me and I'd drive the tractor to farm for