Now that I’ve passed 50 years of writing this weekly column, I’m granting myself the privilege to occasionally re-tell humorous events from my growing-up years. I say “re-tell” becuz I’d bet — though I can’t, for sure, remember — that I’ve told these stories before in columns decades ago.
If I have and you can remember them accurately back that many years, congratulations. I’m betting these long-ago stories will be new to you. At any rate, here goes the first story about milk barn humor. And, it’s a true story.
Back in the mid-1950s when I wuz in the 7th grade, we were living on a rented, rocky old poor farm north of Bronson, Kan., where the north and south headwater branches of the Osage River come together before heading to the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri a couple hundred miles east.
Our main source of income wuz a small herd of about 10 milk cows, It wuz mixed breed, but most of them were Holsteins. Dad — ol’ Czar E. Yield — and I milked the cows by hand twice a day. I milked the two gentlest, easiest-to-milk cows and Dad all the rest.
We sold the milk in 10-gallon milk cans that the milk hauler picked up twice a week. Dad kept the milk cool by using a rope to lower the milk cans into the water of an open-top well.
Although the milking operation was rudimentary, at best, ol’ Czar did his level best to keep the milk clean. His cleanliness routine included a bucket of chlorine water that he used to wash the cows udders off before we milked them.
Well, we had one old Holstein cow who had a huge udder. She wuz easily our best milk producer, too. She also had the unfortunate happenstance of very often lying down in the cow lot with her udder in the middle of a fresh cow pie. That old cow frustrated Czar to no end, but he never wavered from the routine of washing the fresh manure off her udder before he milked her.
Therein, lies the humor of this story. One summer evening Czar and I were in the milk barn and it came time for Czar to milk the filthy-uddered Holstein. She wuz contentedly munching her ration in the wooden stanchion when Dad approached her to wash the manure from her huge, milk-filled udder.
As he bent down behind her and commenced to washing, I noticed that the old cow started raising her tail and humping her back. I knew full-well what those tell-tale signs meant. And, I knew it wuz going to end badly for Dad. But, I also knew it would be funny. So, I stayed mute and watched in slow-motion as a milk-barn mental home video for the ages unfolded in front of me.
With Czar still bent over under her tail, the old Holstein unleashed a torrent of warm cow urine. The stream hit dad at about the nape of his neck and knocked his cap off onto the dirt barn floor. Dad instantaneously pulled back — in plenty of time to see the old cow fill his cap to overflowing.
Needless to say, Czar wuzn’t happy about what happened. And, he wuz even more unhappy to see his impertinent son bent over in uncontrollable laughter. I thought I might be in for a good thrashing, but, luckily for me, it didn’t take Czar long to see the humor in the situation, too.
As he took a pitchfork and dragged his urine-soaked cap out of the mess and threw it on top of the manure pile outside, while still grinning — and mopping his neck with his handkerchief — he seriously told me, “You’ll never let that happen again, if you know what’s good for you.”
I’ll bet ol’ Dad is laughing again looking down from on high.
***
This story might or might not be true. You decide.
When I wuz a teenaged boy, I got a temporary job at a seed cleaning bizness operated by ol’ Kleenan Baggitt. It wuz during the fescue seed harvest and the new seed wuz coming in fast and furious.
One of my jobs wuz to stack seed sacks by hand in the warehouse. There were several of us young bucks working at the job. Naturally, as teenagers, we just had to know who could hand-stack sacks of seed the highest.
So, one morning the work crew faced a mountain of unstacked sacks. So, we each started our own pile. The piles of each boy got higher and higher. Finally, I knew I’d about reached my limit, but decided to put a herculean effort to toss one more sack onto the top of my pile.
Sadly, it didn’t work and the entire pile slowly tipped over and almost buried me beneath those sacks. And, I hurt my back, but not seriously.
However, and this is important, I did learn one life lesson. I learned the wisdom of always practicing “safe sacks.”
***
And old farmer wuz feeling poorly and went to his doctor to get a diagnosis. When his sawbones asked the farmer about his diet, the farmer told him that he’d switched to organic foods because he’d heard they were more healthful to eat than over-processed foods with lots of preservatives.
His doc looked at him and said, “Forget about organic foods. At your age, you need all the preservatives you can get.”
***
Words of wisdom for the week. “This era on Earth will go down in history as the Dumb Age.”
Have a good ‘un
