The Weaker Sex?
Take a close look
Take a really close look at the picture to the left. This is a combine reel in the early 1930′s. And that’s not wheat wound around the reel. That’s my grandfather’s clothes.
Granddad Ragan had done what every farmer, ever mechanic knows NOT to do. He reached in to clear something out that was clogging the machine while the machine was still running. And sure enough, it caught hold of his clothes and started pulling them off. Along with the clothes, it was starting to pull the man into the machine. His 4-year-old son (my dad) was able to climb into the combine and turn it off just as it was starting to chew on Granddad’s arm.
So what does this have to do with the “weaker sex”? Let me tell you. My grandmother had to take her wounded husband and put him on a train to Seward, Nebraska, across the state so that his dad, Dr. Seth Ragan, could put him back together. As she watched the train take her husband away, she was left with 4 children, the oldest of whom was 4 years old. She was also left with an incomplete harvest. And this was the early 30′s in farm country in the Midwest. And it was July! Hot and windy and often miserable, watching the skies for hail storms to wipe out your entire year’s income.
Just take a minute to think about what needed to be done. Knowing what farm people are like to this day, I assume that there were neighbors who helped complete that harvest. I’m sure that there were women to help with the children. But there was nobody who could really shoulder the responsibility of the farm and the children while she was there “alone”. And there was nobody who could really feel that pain of knowing what had happened to her husband or the fear of wondering how he would be when he came home.
Bear in mind, I didn’t hear this story from my grandmother, Lucile Blanche Adams Ragan. I heard it from my mother when we were foraging through pictures for the book that I’m writing about her and Dad. But Grandma didn’t tell me this or other horror stories that she would have survived as a farmer’s wife in southwest Nebraska. I never heard her tell any “woe was me” stories. Like thousands of other young wives and mothers living on farms in the Midwest in the 1930′s, she just did what needed to be done. And she did it well. And she did it with pride. And she did it with love.
That was my Grandma Ragan.
