Grandpa Varden, Early Years

This is from a conversation my cousin Genet had with our Grandpa Varden, summer of 2014.

There is quite a lot to it, so it will be in installments. This is part one.

{What is your very first memory that you have? From your childhood or however far back you can remember?}

Well, I lived in spring Hill, KS. My dad taught there for a while. I was probably 3 or 4 years old. I can remember the neighbors had a boat.

{What was your everyday life like as a kid?}

Well, actually... well, we probably just spent most of the day playing. As a young kid we had some chores. We didn't live in the country at all. We lived in North Newton, KS for a while. My dad was a teacher at Bethel College. We had chores of going in to the garden and picking potato bugs off the plants. Occasional chores required were we would churn milk for butter, we would
We didn't have much in the way of yard duties because we didn't have a very big yard.

And we played with the rest of the Campus Kids. We used to have to walk two miles to the grade school from North Newton to Cooper Grade School. I went to Cooper Grade School from kindergarten to fourth grade. Then we moved to Lawrence. What I remember as a child was just playing with the neighbor kids.

{What were your relationships like with your brothers? Who were you closest to?}

Well, Denard was a year and a half older than I and we spent most of our time together. Lanoy was quite a bit younger, and Fernan was older so Denard and I spent most time together. And we were also bitter rivals. He was a year and a half older and stronger than I was and he won most of our fights. I can remember he put a headlock on me and that was the end of the battle.

We slept together in the same bed.

{So you didn't spend a lot of time with Fernan and Lanoy?}

Fernan had his own friends and was, well, he was there at meal time but ... mainly it was Denard and I that battled together and played together. Like I said, Lanoy was younger.

{How would you describe your relationship with your parents and their parenting style? Were you close with your parents? Did you get along well? How did they raise you?}

Well, we were close to our parents. Dad was crippled. I know that he would play catch with us by the hour and encouraged us in all our sports activities. And he'd read to us by the hour. I remember sitting in his lap most evenings when he was home.

Mother was, well, her primary job was housewife and mother, and she was very concerned about our health. I know that she spent a lot of her time reading, was up on health activities. She knew when the vitamins came out, shemade certain we took our vitamins. She was very concerned about our health. For instance, she used milk in the oatmeal instead of water because it was healthier. She thought ice cream cones were a waste of - the ice cream was fine but the cone was a waste of effort. It wasn't worth eating.

{What was the best advice you ever got from your parents? Did they ever give you good advice?}
They were very concerned that we didn't spend money foolishly, for sure. Because we never had much money. We never went hungry as far as that's concerned, but dad's income from Bethel College was, well, it limited our activities quite severely. Like I said, we never went hungry we never lacked for food or clothing but we were very restricted on what we spent our money on.

{What were your parents expectations for you boys?}
They were very concerned about our going to school. They expected us all to graduate from college. I think we all did except for Denard, he never was very interested in studying. We all had to take piano lessons growing up, and Denard always skipped out on his. He would come home and take his spanking and the next week he'd skip again. They expected us to do well in school.

{Do you feel like you inherited any specific traits from your parents?}
I guess frugality to some extent. And they were also very concerned about our spiritual upbringing, you never miss going to Sunday School and Junior Endeavor. I mean, that was never a thought in our mind that you wouldn't participate. And the kids we grew up with, our friends, were pretty like-minded. A lot of them were faculty members kids at Bethel College and our ideals were the same.

{What was your first job?}
It was picking potatoes. I think I was probably fourth grade, third or fourth grade. Denard was a year and a half older and I got sick in the middle of the field. He had to take me home and he was very t'd off that we were making big money and I got sick and had to be taken home. I actually drank too much water and didn't replace the salt and got faint. But we were in grade school.

They didn't insist we had a job, but the opportunity came about somehow, and we wanted to make some money.

We got five cents for a bushel of potatoes.

{Did you get to keep the money?}
Yeah, we got to keep it.

{What other jobs did you have before your high school graduation? Favorite?}
I worked at a cannery when I was a sophomore in high school, during the summer. They brought in, people from all over the place brought in produce from their gardens, corn, beans, whatever. And well, they had women that worked, prepared it, put it in cans, and another fellow and I were in charge of taking these cans and putting them in a steamer, sterilizing them. That was one summer's job.

Another summer I worked at a rock quarry. That job consisted of, they would take rock out of a big hole, put it in a pick up truck and dump it in a rail car. The rail car was  to the crushing tower. I worked in the crushing tower and what that amounted to was the rocks were just dumped on the floor. I had a large pike and I just shoved the into the crusher. Looking back, that was a pretty dangerous job and they didn't have any safety rails or anything

We also shoveled coal at that same place. They stored coal.

Oh, one summer we, a couple summers we spent on Uncle Albert's farm in Oklahoma, his dairy farm. Milking cows and doing regular farm chores, taking int he harvest and planting wheat for the next fall. That was a couple of summers.

Another job I had was at a cement plant. We made cement blocks. They had a form that you set up, then you filled it with sand and cement and you compressed it. After you compressed it you took the form off around the block and put the block where it could dry. That was a summer's job. That was probably almost more than I could handle. I was, I think, a freshman in high school that summer. The cement sacks were 94 pounds, they were kind of heavy.

I worked at an ice plant when I was in college, during the summer, the Newton ice plant made 300 lb blocks of ice and we took those blocks of ice and stored them in a warehouse. Part of that job was also icing railroad cars that carried fruit. They would bring those cars up to the ice plant and they would shove these big blocks of ice out on the ends of the railroad cards and we'd chip the ice into smaller pieces and fill the bunker on both ends of the railroad cars to keep them cool shipping fruit.

That was part of the summer and part of the summer was working where people kept their frozen food. They had lockers that were about 2 feet by 2 feet by 1 1/2 feet where they would store meat. People would bring in their meat and we'd put it in the freezers.

And one summer I worked for... right after we moved back to Kansas, before I got drafted I worked for a couple farmers in the Moundridge area for wheat harvest. They had a house trailer beside the house, a couple of bachelors lived in that. They had a couple of high school girls cooking for them. So we got our meals. Just did general harvest work, I drove truck mostly.

{How did harvest work back then?}
Well, they had combines that you pulled with tractors. Very few had self-propelled combines at that time. I don't remember self-propelled. So you had a person on the tractor and a person on the combine. Then you had to have somebody hauling wheat of course. Most of the combines, probably the biggest was a 12-foot cut. But it wasn't baling it anymore. You weren't making shocks of wheat like they had probably 10 years before.

{Where did you take it in the truck?}
They didn't have the coop. They just had private elevators. That one was in Elyria that we were hauling to.

Did you work with Denard a lot? Did he do a lot of the same stuff?
We worked at the stone quarry together. He drove a truck and I was working up int he crushing mill. He had other jobs, we didn't work together very often.

{Did you enjoy school?}
It was a lot of fun. Yes, it was enjoyable.

{Best and worst memories of high school?}
Well, the best memories were our basketball team when I was a junior and senior. Senior year we went undefeated until we got into the tournament they drafted our center. He was, at that time, the war was on, and Fred was our center, probably our best player. But he had failed one year. He should have been a senior but was a junior. At that time they had a rule that if you were a senior and turned 18 they'd let you graduate. If you weren't a senior and turned 18 they'd draft you. A week before we went to the state tournament they drafted him. Otherwise I think we were a shoo-in to win the state tournament. We won the first two games of the state tournament.

I played football also. I never enjoyed football as much as basketball. Int he spring they had baseball instead of track. Which, we never had a very good baseball team at all.

As far as the worst time in school... I thin probably kindergarten. The kindergarten teacher we had... I didn't like her. I can still remember her. Mrs. Bean.

During the war, there was, if you were a Mennonite and a CO, uh, you were pretty severely ostracized, depending on the situation. For instance, you probably didn't go uptown Saturday nights. You'd be afraid you might get beat up or something. At school, it wasn't much of a problem, but I think the teachers saw to it that it wasn't much of a problem. It was kind of underground. If you were a Mennonite and they knew you had pacifist tendencies, that could be kind of uncomfortable.

{Did you ever have problems with other kids because of that?}
Well, you'd get called a blankety-blank CO, or yellow-belly or whatever. And, most of your friends weren't involved in that. Mostly when you were in the younger grades, the older kids
Some of my best friends, the Klassen (spelling?) brothers, well their dad was an art instructor at Bluffton College and they all went in CPS camps. And, of course, we spent a lot of time with them.

You kind of picked your friends according to the ones that were sympathetic to your ideals.

{How old were you when your dad died? How did that affect you and your family?}
16. That was pretty devastating. He'd been ill for about two years and just gradually got worse. His last six months he was pretty much bedridden. Just before he died he had sixty lumps on his body that were quite tender from the cancer he had. It was devastating in the fact that we live din the boys' dorm and we had to find housing right away. Mom, she went through her junior year in college and then got married. So the next year she spent a year finishing her degree. And she taught from then on, until she was in her seventies. But, Fernan was deferred from the draft for a short period of time because he was contributing to the family income. When mom started teaching he got drafted. Denard had polio and was 4-F so he never got drafted.

After I graduated from high school, I knew I was going to be drafted right away. We moved from Bluffton back to Newton and they deferred me until I transferred my records. Then I got drafted about a month after we moved to Newton.

It was, well, dad died with a $5,000 insurance. That was what mom had to live on. At that time, of course it was worth more than it is not, but it's still not very much. So she had to go to work.

{Did you feel like you had to grow up faster because of that? Or have ot start contributing more aft erhe died?}
Well, I was a junior in high school and we finished out the year at Bluffton and Mom finished that year and got her degree. She taught in a little town in Hammer(?), Ohio. And Denard and I stayed in Bluffton. I made arrangements for us to stay in the boys dorm at Bluffton College. Denard was a freshman at Bluffton and we roomed together. I had the job of {residence hall} was a three-story dorm. At that time, during the war, there was only boys on the first floor. I got the job of janitor. In lieu of that, they paid for my room and board. I got to eat at the dining hall.

Lanoy, of course he was younger and he went with mom. When we moved back to Newton we were back together again.

{Did you move to Newton because your mom had a job there?}
She didn't have a job. But she just knew she could probably pick up a teaching job because they were pretty scarce during the war. Of course, she was older and during peace time she would have had a difficult time finding a job because of her age. She taught in small towns around. She taught at Lehigh and I don't remember what some of the other towns were. She'd come home weekends. She bought a little house in Newton and that's where Denard and I lived. And Lanoy. We went to college there.