Abstract
Dorothy Vani and Myron Marfut grew up on the Lorenz property in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park during the 1950s. Coming from an Austrian descent, these two siblings illustrate their experiences of what farm life was like during this time in the Northeastern Ohio region. We were able to extract valuable information from this interview, such as how the farm was run solely by their mother because of a divorce over religious issues, the duties/chores that came with living the farmer's lifestyle, and what daily routines consisted of on this property.
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Interviewee
Vani, Dorothy (interviewee); Marfut, Myron (interviewee)
Interviewer
Fasko, Kevin (interviewer)
Project
Cuyahoga Valley Project
Date
4-6-2011
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
60 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Dorothy Vani and Myron Marfut Interview, 06 April 2011" (2011). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 518024.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/133
Transcript
Transcription sponsored by Cuyahoga Valley National Park
Carolyn Conklin [00:00:03] Alright, whenever you are ready.
Kevin Fasko [00:00:07] Alright. I'm Kevin Fasko, and I'm a Cleveland State student, and I will be interviewing...
Dorothy Vani [00:00:13] Dorothy Vani.
Myron Marfut [00:00:14] And Myron Marfut.
Kevin Fasko [00:00:16] Alright. We will be using this information to archive in Cleveland State and help with the Cleveland, Cuyahoga Valley Park, National Park, I'm sorry. Well, let's get started here. Basically you guys were farmers. You grew up on a farm, correct?
Myron Marfut [00:00:32] Well, I wouldn't call it a farm. It was 20 acres. Wecame off of a farm that was 80 acres. So this was just a place to move to before we started building our house. Okay.
Kevin Fasko [00:00:44] Okay, so where was that other farm previously?
Myron Marfut [00:00:48] Strongsville.
Kevin Fasko [00:00:49] Okay, and why would, why did you move from the 80 acre to the 20 acre?
Myron Marfut [00:00:53] Because we were renting the 80 acres and we bought the 20 acres, or my mother bought the 20 acres.
Kevin Fasko [00:00:59] So your... Well, I've researched and your mother did run this farm, right?
Myron Marfut [00:01:03] She ran the farm. We did a lot of the work, but she ran the farm, and it was her job. We did what she asked us to do.
Kevin Fasko [00:01:09] Right, right. So basically, when did you purchase this 20-acre plot of land?
Myron Marfut [00:01:16] 1947.
Kevin Fasko [00:01:19] '47? Okay. And when you came here, you guys were how old?
Myron Marfut [00:01:26] I was 16.
Dorothy Vani [00:01:26] And I was eight.
Kevin Fasko [00:01:27] Eight years old?
Dorothy Vani [00:01:28] Mhm.
Kevin Fasko [00:01:30] How many siblings did you guys have when you came here?
Myron Marfut [00:01:32] Well, all together, there's eight kids in our family, but at the time we moved out here, there was Andy, George, me, Eli, and her.
Dorothy Vani [00:01:45] And Dira.
Myron Marfut [00:01:45] Oh yeah, and Dira, but two of my brothers were in Cleveland. No, one was, had got married and the other was in the service, in the Army, service.
Kevin Fasko [00:01:58] So...
Dorothy Vani [00:01:59] Which I'd like to add that all six of my brothers served in the military at one time or another.
Kevin Fasko [00:02:08] So when you guys came to the farm, you said you were 16, you were eight. So what was a typical day like on the farm? [inaudible]
Myron Marfut [00:02:17] Well, it was nothing like you would visualize a farm. It was 20 acres of vacant land. And my mother asked my older brother, who was 21, and his name was Andy, can you build a house? And he said, I don't know. We could try. I was 16, George was 18, and Andy was 21, and we proceeded to build a house.
Kevin Fasko [00:02:48] What materials? You build it yourself?
Myron Marfut [00:02:49] We built it all ourselves. I dug, with my brother George, we dug the footer with a pick and shovel. They didn't have backhoes. They didn't have any of that stuff. We loosened the ground up with a pick and we shoveled it out for the foundation of the house. And I'm going to estimate the house was twenty 24 by about 40 maybe, I don't remember. It's been a long time ago. And then we laid the block, and I was 16 years old. I'm laying cement block. And I guess I did a pretty good job. The house is still standing. [laughs].
Dorothy Vani [00:03:24] [Laughs]
Kevin Fasko [00:03:26] Is it down over there?
Myron Marfut [00:03:27] So. No, go ahead, you want to fill in something? I'm...
Kevin Fasko [00:03:37] And Dorothy, what was your role in this house we're... Did you have any involvement in building it?
Dorothy Vani [00:03:42] I didn't have [crosstalk] any involvement in the building. I remember when we would go there and my mother would build a fire, and somehow she had a thing that would hold bacon over the top of the fire. And we would eat bacon and bacon sandwiches. And usually I think she had a pan or something over the fire. And we used... We had bacon and onion sandwiches and dried onions and, oh, they were delicious. [laughs]
Kevin Fasko [00:04:15] Did you use your own goods that you guys were farming, like for the bacon?
Dorothy Vani [00:04:18] No, that was what... Well, it was what we brought from the other farm.
Kevin Fasko [00:04:21] From the other farm. [Dorothy: Right.]
Myron Marfut [00:04:21] Okay, so after we started, we built the house. Oh, well, were building the house for a year and a half because there was no electricity on the road that we were building on, and the electricity ended about three quarters of a mile from our house. So at the time, it wasn't called Ohio Edison, I don't what they called it at that, but maybe it was Ohio Edison. But they said, yeah, we could bring the electric down. Number one, you're gonna have to pay for it. And number two, I don't know how soon we can get to it. About a year and eight months, they finally brought the electric down to where we building the house. Up until then, we had to cut everything by hand. Handsaw. We didn't have power saws. And there was a rough way to build the house, but it come out good. It was a good, solid house. Then they brought the electric down two days before Christmas 1948. And up until then we used kerosene lanterns and what do you call 'em?
Dorothy Vani [00:05:25] Coleman lanterns.
Myron Marfut [00:05:25] Coleman lanterns, you know? And we had oil heat and an outside toilet. We didn't have an inside toilet in those days because where are you going to put it? You know. So that's the way we grew up in that, you know, and as time went by, we finally finished the house up. My brother, the 21-year-old, is the one that was gonna direct the project. He did a good job of it. And...
Dorothy Vani [00:05:59] He ended up being an engineer. [crosstalk] Electrical engineer, actually.
Myron Marfut [00:06:01] Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Graduated from Case...
Dorothy Vani [00:06:03] Mhm.
Myron Marfut [00:06:04] But. Maybe you can go from there.
Dorothy Vani [00:06:09] I'm sorry, I miss... I interrupted you. The only thing I can think of is when we first moved to that 20 acres of land, the road was called Commodore Road. It was not called Akron Peninsula Road at that time. And we lived there. And Dugway Hill at that time would take you straight into Peninsula. And I guess that's why they later changed it to Akron Peninsula Road. When we moved into the summer of nineteen, into the house in the summer of 1948, as Myron said, there was no electric. We had a kerosene cook stove. And then at one time I remember a wood-burning stove because it had a container on the side that heated water while you were cooking. Okay, and we used the Coleman lanterns and so on, as my brother said. I think my brother has a good story about electric, not having electric, and how we listened to the radio.
Myron Marfut [00:07:12] Oh okay. So the electric wasn't brought down until the twenty-third of December, two days before Christmas, 1948. We had the whole house decorated, just waiting so we can plug the thing in to have lights. Up until then it was all the lanterns. What did you want me to... I already forgot.
Dorothy Vani [00:07:36] How you, how you listened to the radio.
Myron Marfut [00:07:38] Oh, oh, that's right. Of course we did have electric, we didn't have radios or anything. So we had a car radio in the living room and we run the wire through the, well, we had casement windows, these big metal windows that open like this? We run the wire out to a car. My brother would pull his car up as close as he could to the house and we'd hook it up to the battery on his car and listen to the radio in the house. That was our only only way of getting electric to the house to listen to the radio.
Kevin Fasko [00:08:13] Until after that Christmas, right?
Myron Marfut [00:08:15] After Christmas, we had lights.
Kevin Fasko [00:08:18] Lights. [Myron: Yeah.] That's good. So, you said that this was a house that is 20 by 40, you said?
Myron Marfut [00:08:23] I'm gonna guess in that. Isn't that 24 by 40? I'm not sure.
Kevin Fasko [00:08:26] So including your mother who was 70 who lived in this house?
Myron Marfut [00:08:30] Okay, there was two bedrooms on the first floor. She, her older sister, and our mother was in the one bedroom. My older... Andy had his own bedroom. And the rest of us, there was three of us, lived on the second floor. It had two floors.
Dorothy Vani [00:08:49] So there were six of us living at home at that time.
Kevin Fasko [00:08:54] Oh, so your family got involved in farming with that previous plot of land you said in Strongsville? Is that where you said it was?
Myron Marfut [00:09:00] Yeah.
Kevin Fasko [00:09:00] When... Did you come from a family of farmers?
Myron Marfut [00:09:05] No.
Kevin Fasko [00:09:05] No?
Myron Marfut [00:09:07] My mother was born in Austria. My father was born in Austria. So I'm going to guess that they had farming knowledge because back in those days, they must have done a lot of farming in Austria. But we didn't know too much about it except for what our mother told us.
Kevin Fasko [00:09:22] So. So you guys from Austrian descent. When... When did your ancestors come over here?
Myron Marfut [00:09:32] Those were the only two, my mother and our father.
Kevin Fasko [00:09:34] Oh, your mother and father were...
Myron Marfut [00:09:35] Yeah, they both came over from Austria. In fact, my mother came over when she was 14 years old from Austria by herself. And she's on this big boat. Never been on a boat in her life. And she's coming over to the United States. And the first thing she saw was the Statue of Liberty and to hear her talk about the Statue of Liberty, boy that was the greatest thing in the world to her.
Kevin Fasko [00:10:01] Do you remember anything she actually said about that?
Myron Marfut [00:10:02] Oh boy. Yeah, she talked a lot about it. But, you know, just not real stories. But she got there. She needed a certain amount of money in her pocket when she landed in New York. And then they'd have to have somebody meet them to accept them into the country, and her and lived in Cohos, New York. And she never showed up until what? Hours later, wasn't it?
Dorothy Vani [00:10:34] I guess so, yeah, I think so.
Myron Marfut [00:10:36] And so she was sitting there by herself, couldn't speak a word of English, trying to, you know... But she survived.
Kevin Fasko [00:10:44] What year was that? Do you know?
Myron Marfut [00:10:45] 1914.
Kevin Fasko [00:10:45] 1914? So how did she end up in Ohio and Strongsville?
Myron Marfut [00:10:51] Well, we lived... Okay, that's a good part of the story. We lived in Cleveland. I don't know how she ever got to Cleveland, but we were in Cleveland. And they owned their own house. My mother and father owned their house in Cleveland. When the Great Depression came, they lost the house. They couldn't make the payments. So we went on rent. We rented here, we rented there, until this house became available in... Broadview Heights is where we first landed. And we had a nice farm in Broadview Heights, 50 acres. We were doing a lot of farming. And they sold the house because we were renting it and we moved to Strongsville. And in Strongsville we had an 80-acre farm, and I was 11 years old when I was driving the tractor to plow the fields. You know, I mean, it was not unusual. This is just the way it was done, you know. And then I don't know how she ever heard about Boston Heights. Now she says...
Dorothy Vani [00:11:55] Well, she somehow she heard about the land in Boston Heights, okay? I don't... I thought it was from a Mr. Golber, but I don't know if that... That doesn't seem to ring a bell with other people. But I seem to remember that name. But when we first bought the house, of course, we had to hand dig a well so we could get water, and my brothers hand dug the well and... But it was difficult to reach water in Boston Heights. And but what we did was we used a bucket and a rope to get the water out of the well. And we got our drinking and cooking water from the neighbors, the Headlands who were around the corner from the Girl Scout camp but on the same street, same road. And we would fill ten milk, ten-gallon milk cans and have them sitting in the kitchen. And that's what we used for our water. We had an outhouse out back and we either sponge bathed or, in a pan in the kitchen, or I remember occasionally bathing in a galvanized round tub in the basement, and the basement still had a dirt floor, but we eventually had a coal furnace down there. And so it was warm down there, okay?
Kevin Fasko [00:13:16] This is before you moved to...
Dorothy Vani [00:13:17] No, this is in Boston Heights.
Kevin Fasko [00:13:21] Okay. Alright.
Dorothy Vani [00:13:21] My main memory is Boston Heights because I was eight years old. I was four years old when we moved to Strongsville. I was eight years old when we moved to Boston Heights. So most of my growing up years were in Boston Heights. Right.
Myron Marfut [00:13:39] Yeah, we... We didn't have anything. I mean, no water, no electric. We survived. I mean, I don't know how we ever did, but we did. You were saying something, I forgot what you were saying, and I wanted to... But anyhow, I wish I had my notes. I forgot my notes.
Dorothy Vani [00:14:00] Well, I guess I'll go on. My strongest memory was the fact that my family was able to build a house by themselves. No contractor. Our mother being from Europe knew how to clear the land, raise the animals, grow the food, not only for ourselves but to sell as well. We were poor, but we never went hungry.
Myron Marfut [00:14:26] We had the stuff that we raised, chickens, ducks, whatever, vegetables. I was 16. I was driving a pickup truck. I didn't even have a driver's license. I shouldn't tell you this. I was 18 before I got my driver's license, never got a ticket. But anyhow, we used to go into Slavic Village. Do you know where Slavic Village is in Cleveland?
Kevin Fasko [00:14:50] It's in Cleveland. Yes.
Myron Marfut [00:14:51] Yeah. And off of 71st Street, we had a route there. Once a week. We drive the pickup truck up there loaded with all kind of sweet corn, chickens, eggs, whatever. And my wife, my mother would sell this to the people and they waited for us every week. They knew we were coming and we sold all this to them and then could go back. That's where we got of our money from.
Kevin Fasko [00:15:15] So you built a pretty strong relationship with these ethnic neighborhoods.
Myron Marfut [00:15:18] Right, in that area. Yeah.
Kevin Fasko [00:15:20] So you were on like pretty much a personal basis with them, correct?
Dorothy Vani [00:15:24] I would say so, yeah. [crosstalk] Yeah.
Dorothy Vani [00:15:27] My parents were ethnic.
Kevin Fasko [00:15:28] Yeah. So it's interesting because when you. Was it strictly just Slavic Village or were any other areas around here?
Dorothy Vani [00:15:38] Oh I don't know, I'm... They called it Slavic Village because it was a lot of foreigners lived there. And I guess that's why it came up with that name. I don't know.
Kevin Fasko [00:15:47] So there were any, like, specific neighborhood demographics that you...
Myron Marfut [00:15:51] I would say so.
Kevin Fasko [00:15:52] It's pretty much middle European.
Myron Marfut [00:15:52] Yeah. Yeah. I would say so. I don't know other other than that.
Kevin Fasko [00:15:56] So with... I actually read that you guys also sold cottage cheese and butter.
Myron Marfut [00:16:02] Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. She made butter. Yeah.
Kevin Fasko [00:16:05] Did you have livestock on your farm to provide the dairy or...
Myron Marfut [00:16:07] We had one or two cows. How many did we have?
Dorothy Vani [00:16:09] We had several. I think we had more than that.
Myron Marfut [00:16:11] Okay.
Dorothy Vani [00:16:11] I would guess more like four or five. Yeah.
Myron Marfut [00:16:13] But she would milk the cows by hand and make the butter. Then the milk... We didn't sell a whole lot of milk. We sold milk in Strongsville because we had a route in Strongsville on one of the roads there, but I don't know if she sold much milk in Slavic Village or not. I don't think so.
Dorothy Vani [00:16:33] No, I think she made the homemade cottage cheese, and how she did that was she took a cheese cloth bag, would fill it with what we called lumpy milk [laughs] and she would put that bag between two boards and put a rock on top of the bag, on top of the board. And the whey would come out of the bag then. And when it all came out, it was cottage cheese. And then the butter... She had a cream separator. I think that came later on. But she had a cream separator. In the addition that we put on the house, our original house, I thought it was more like 32 maybe or something, or 35 by 24. And then we put an addition on the back of the house and we called that our summer kitchen, and she had the cream separator in the summer kitchen and she would milk.
Myron Marfut [00:17:30] That was after we had electric.
Dorothy Vani [00:17:32] Oh yes.
Myron Marfut [00:17:33] Yeah.
Dorothy Vani [00:17:33] Oh yes. I would say 1950 is when we added on to the house and she had a cream separator in that summer kitchen when she would milk the cows in a bucket. And we had cats and dogs and we had pigs and geese and ducks and all kinds of animals. And but what she would do is take... The cats and the dogs were always waiting for her to finish milking the cows because they got the first taste of the fresh milk. She always poured a container, you know, a pan of milk for them. And they lapped it all up, of course. And then she'd bring the milk into the summer kitchen and put it through the cream separator. And that would separate the cream from the milk, which then we could make butter out of that cream.
Myron Marfut [00:18:21] The milk, or the milk that's left over is what they call skim milk. Okay?
Kevin Fasko [00:18:25] Right.
Myron Marfut [00:18:26] Yeah.
Dorothy Vani [00:18:26] Right.
Kevin Fasko [00:18:29] So obviously, you guys were educated, like you guys built a house, you guys were educated. So where did you guys go to school?
Dorothy Vani [00:18:37] [laughs]
Myron Marfut [00:18:37] Right up the street here. Yeah.
Dorothy Vani [00:18:39] In Peninsula. Boston High School.
Myron Marfut [00:18:42] Yeah.
Kevin Fasko [00:18:42] Was it...
Dorothy Vani [00:18:42] Originally Strongsville.
Kevin Fasko [00:18:44] It wasn't too rural of an area, right? Like you guys had neighbors, you guys... [crosstalk]
Myron Marfut [00:18:47] Oh, well, no, no. The street we lived on, Commodore Road or Akron Peninsula Road, there was one family that lived across the street in a barn way back from the road, Kurzes. And...
Dorothy Vani [00:19:03] Oh...
Myron Marfut [00:19:05] They built...
Dorothy Vani [00:19:06] The Kurzes didn't live across the street. God!
Myron Marfut [00:19:08] Oh, not Kurzes. What's the other name?
Dorothy Vani [00:19:10] Yontz.
Myron Marfut [00:19:11] Yontz. Yontz. [Dorothy laughs] They lived across the street, and in the barn way the back, and after we built our house, then they started building their own house. And that may be because my mother got—I think now, I'm not sure of this—I think she... the electric company eventually paid her for any house that attached to the electric wires, she got compensated because she paid for the wires that come down. And after that, then these people across the street, they moved in, they built the house closer to the street, or to the road, and moved moved out of that barn back there where they lived.
Dorothy Vani [00:19:50] She was an Indian lady and she plowed her fields with a horse and a plow in the back.
Myron Marfut [00:19:58] A walk-behind plow.
Dorothy Vani [00:19:59] Yeah. A walk... Yeah.
Myron Marfut [00:20:01] Heck. We're talking about 1940s.
Kevin Fasko [00:20:02] Right.
Myron Marfut [00:20:03] You know. [laughs]
Dorothy Vani [00:20:05] We at least had a tractor. [laughs]
Myron Marfut [00:20:08] Yeah.
Dorothy Vani [00:20:08] I will say though, my mother cleared the land, a lot of it with her sythe, okay? And she also used a sickle to... When we planted corn, field corn, and she would take the sickle and chop the corn with the sickle and then put it in a corn shock so that it would dry. And then after it was dried, we would take the corn cob off of the dried corn and put it through a hand cranking corn sheller. And that was for the chickens and the geese and all that.
Kevin Fasko [00:20:48] So you guys, you were a self-sustaining family, right?
Dorothy Vani [00:20:50] Absolutely.
Myron Marfut [00:20:50] Oh yeah, yeah.
Kevin Fasko [00:20:51] So I mean, there's obviously some meeting between profit and... [inaudible]
Dorothy Vani [00:20:57] Okay. My mother... We used to take stuff to Slavic Village. That was one source of income. Then she had a job cleaning a bank or a couple of banks in Cleveland, not of money. She'd clean 'em up [Kevin laughs] at the end of the week. [laughs] But she... That was her income. On the weekends she would do that because they... And in order for her to get there, she, if we weren't home, she would walk... How far do you think it is? About a mile or mile and a half?
Dorothy Vani [00:21:32] I'd say at least a mile and a half to Boston Mill, or to Route 8, Old Route 8.
Myron Marfut [00:21:36] Boston Mills Road and Old Route 8. She'd catch a Greyhound bus, and he'd take her to Cleveland. She cleaned the banks and then come back and then walk this distance, if we weren't home she'd walk it.
Kevin Fasko [00:21:50] This is every weekend?
Myron Marfut [00:21:52] Every weekend. That was her source of money. When I was 18, I got a job working on the golf course. I got long legs. And Wing Chadwick was the owner of the golf course.
Dorothy Vani [00:22:05] Boston Hills Golf...
Myron Marfut [00:22:07] Boston Hills Country Club. And he says, you're the guy for cuttin' the greens. And I cut greens, all eighteen greens, every other day. We cut 'em, every second day we cut the greens. And I did that for a couple of years for a source of income,
Kevin Fasko [00:22:23] But obviously, to provide for your family and yourself.
Myron Marfut [00:22:25] Huh?
Kevin Fasko [00:22:27] Obviously to provide for your family and yourself.
Myron Marfut [00:22:28] Oh, yeah, and my check, whatever it was, I gave my mother two-thirds of it to help her out and I had what was left. And I had a car. I had a '31 Chevy coupe. We're not running... Alright? We had a... I had a '31 Chevy coupe that would... I drove it to school, if I had the gas in it. If I didn't have gas, I'd wait for the school bus. But that's the way we survived.
Kevin Fasko [00:22:57] So tell me more about your mother as a person.
Myron Marfut [00:23:01] Very generous. I wouldn't know if she was strict or not. Do you think she was strict? She was strict with us.
Kevin Fasko [00:23:09] Sounds like a hard worker.
Myron Marfut [00:23:11] Oh, she was a hard worker...
Dorothy Vani [00:23:12] Very hard worker.
Myron Marfut [00:23:12] No question about it. Yeah, well, her and my dad broke up for religious reasons. I won't have to get into it and...
Dorothy Vani [00:23:24] She left my father.
Myron Marfut [00:23:25] And that's when we moved...
Dorothy Vani [00:23:26] With all of our kids... With all of her kids. [laughs]
Myron Marfut [00:23:28] To... That's we moved to Boston Heights, but that's how we managed. We'd all pitch in a little bit, you know, to help her out. And she always paid... Oh, that's one thing she always said. You never... No. If somebody loans you something or you owe them money for, you always pay him first before you buy something else. She says you never buy something if you owe somebody money. And she always did that. And she always... She never had a late payment of anything, I don't believe and...
Dorothy Vani [00:24:03] I think she taught us that as well. And you told her, or you told me about she always bought her lumber and...
Myron Marfut [00:24:12] Terry Lumber. Have you ever heard of Terry Lumber? Well, he was down in, not where he is now, but he was down in the valley where the ski slope is now. And, Terry, everything, even the coal we bought, he delivered it. After the house was built, they delivered the coal to put in our furnace to heat the house. Everything, the wood, the cement blocks, everything we bought from Terry Lumber. And she never, never was late on a payment or anything that I know of. She always paid. Always pay your debts first.
Kevin Fasko [00:24:45] You utilized the wood, obviously, for a fire warmth. Building your house. And anything else that you utilized lumber for?
Myron Marfut [00:24:52] Well, the wooden rafters for the house. And here's another story. Can I write on the back of this? This is the roof of the house. And Andy, he was the... He was a smart one, and like you say, she said he was an engineer, which is true. He put the wood like this, instead of across...
Kevin Fasko [00:25:15] He put that...
Myron Marfut [00:25:16] Right. And the guy from the street across the street, the guy that lived in the barn, he came over and he couldn't get over how he was put in this wood down. And Andy's way of thinking was, if it's this way, the house is going to do this.
Kevin Fasko [00:25:32] That was stabilizing it.
Myron Marfut [00:25:33] Stabilizing. And that's how he... But every piece of wood was cut by hand, not a saw because we didn't, there's no electrcity. And all the woodwork in the house was all... He did it. We took it all home to Strongsville. He'd run on the power saw in Strongsville, and made beautiful woodwork, and he nailed it around the windows. That was how we dressed it up a little bit, you know.
Dorothy Vani [00:25:59] We also used the wood eventually to build a barn and a chicken coop.
Kevin Fasko [00:26:05] So what would, was this livestock, so just the geese, chicken, ducks, were these.... How did you utilize those? For yourself? You were self-sustaining or you guys sold, like you mentioned Slavic Village...
Myron Marfut [00:26:15] Oh, no, we ate a lot of that and then we sold a lot of it. Yeah.
Dorothy Vani [00:26:19] Yeah.
Myron Marfut [00:26:20] But we never went hungry.
Kevin Fasko [00:26:21] Right.
Dorothy Vani [00:26:22] On Sunday, I remember we had the best tasting fried chicken ever. My mother would take the... Kill the chicken on Sunday morning and by Sunday afternoon we were eating it. Okay? And then sometimes when a chicken got a little too old to fry, she would take and make homemade chicken soup with homemade noodles. And then occasionally there'd be a chicken yolk, an egg yolk, in the soup because the older chicken maybe hadn't developed the egg totally. And so she would add that to the soup as well. And it was, it was really good.
Kevin Fasko [00:27:03] Good. You had... When you had... Did you have designated duties on the farm or do you pretty much do what your mother...
Myron Marfut [00:27:10] We did pretty much what she asked us to do. I was the middle one. George was older than me. I was, at that time I was probably 14. No, no, I was 11 when I started driving the tractor, but we'd plow the fields for our crop. This area here was for crop that we sold. A lot of it we sold. It was vegetables. In the back, it was grain or field corn for the animals, you know. Isn't that about the way it was?
Dorothy Vani [00:27:42] Yes. In the area to the right of the house, which was beyond the ravine where the house sits now, beyond the ravine is where the vegetables...
Kevin Fasko [00:27:53] The vegetables. What vegetables did you grow?
Myron Marfut [00:27:55] Oh, everything, everything that you needed...
Myron Marfut [00:27:59] Tomatoes, sweet corn, cucumbers, you name it.
Dorothy Vani [00:28:03] Yeah. Beans, gree
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