Don and Mel Cook were friends of mine along with Mel’s wife Marie. They’re gone now, which is true for a growing number of people I was partial to. I have baseball friends and farmer friends. The Cooks combined those passions, sort of double dip buddies.
The Cooks lived and farmed south of us in Mulligan township. They lived on the place they grew up on. When Mel married, he built a house across the yard. Mel and Marie raised their ten children there. Don, called Duke by his million friends, never married. He lived with his mother and sister Della in the original farmhouse till they passed away.
Mel and Duke raised all the usual crops and animals that one saw on the farms of the last century. In addition, they grew and sold Cook Brothers Seeds. It’s a little lighter ground that way, and my memory of Mel and Duke was that they’d always take another rain if they could get it.
As will be true for most who turn out to be last generation farmers, the Cook family had an auction. I went out there for a few hours in the morning. I wasn’t looking to buy anything, more to see the remnants of their lives gathered in the yard and on bale racks before they were disbursed to the winds.
There was a wonderful collection of old farm equipment, tools, and parts of things, some I knew what they were, some I didn’t. It was a like a popup ag museum, open one day for the curious. Mel and Duke took care of their stuff. They also kept most of it, even past it’s “use by” date. There was the grain drill, drag, rotary hoe, cultivator, and haying equipment that most farms had when I was young. In auctioneer lingo, it was shedded, with good paint and rubber.
It was the type of stuff that straddles the line between useable and being an interesting historic piece. You won’t find a four-row John Deere planter being used today to plant an eighty. Not when a 48-row planter with GPS tractor controls can plant that field in hours and run in the dark if rain is forecast.
There are still scattered farmers on the margins of agriculture who buy smaller equipment. They are mostly young people trying to fit some farming in their lives along with a fulltime job. I’m glad they’re out there, keeping the countryside interesting. I sold an old baler earlier this summer on Craigslist and was surprised how much interest there was. A 1966 International Harvester 47 baler for a small investment might fit such a low budget operation perfectly.
As I was walking around the Cook yard looking at the tools from 50 years of farming, lined up and washed for the sale, I thought about similar pieces we have on our farm in the back of various sheds and out-buildings. Like a steel-wheeled Minneapolis Moline grain drill which I used a few times when I took over from my dad. It hasn’t moved now for a couple decades. Inside the seed hopper cover are penciled in notes Sylvester made about planting dates going back to the Thirties.
The farm was only part of Mel’s and Duke’s lives. Both were heavily involved in the community around here. There were items connected to church, school, and businesses, most of which are gone. Like I said, the brothers grew up there. So, there were things from their boyhoods, games and books and sports equipment. Duke was the keeper of those, as Mel’s house of ten kids wouldn’t have had room.
The racks were full of stuff that could transport you back in time. There was a leather football helmet with a blue felt M glued to it, likely the work of Mel and Duke’s mom. Mulligan? It was in the original box! There was an Ethan Allen’s All-Star Baseball Game from 1941 without torn corners, all the player cards intact. I could picture the young Cooks playing carefully, intent on keeping the box intact.
I suspect if I wouldn’t have married, my house would have been filled with stuff from my years. As It is, I have a couple corners of the basement with my electric football and Strat-o-Matic baseball games, plus odd baseball “collectibles:” pennants, cards, bobbleheads, mini-bats. Then there’s books, too many books that I likely won’t read again.
Part of the problem is never moving, except for college and a couple early married years. I’ve never had that sorting and flushing that one needs to do when you go to a new place. Beside the basement, there are the aforementioned sheds. There are tools and farm items that even predate my father. Ours is a century farm, and I have stuff to prove it.
Last winter Pam came across the writing and videos of Marie Kondo. Marie is an “organizing consultant,” which is a career that didn’t exist when I was a kid. She is a proponent of minimizing your stuff, keeping what “sparks joy” in you. I could see Pam consuming her writings, and thought, “Oh, oh.”
I tried to make the case to Pam that it all sparked joy. She wasn’t buying it. At one point I texted to the kids, “Mom wants to get rid of all my stuff!” I was half joking. Seriously, getting older means sorting, keeping those few things that your kids might want, finding a proper home for others, and trying to minimize the mess they’ll have to clean up when you’re gone.
I’ve tried to imagine the auction here hopefully far down the road. Those old fencing and haying tools that warm my heart as I remember working with my father won’t mean much to whoever is here. But I checked with God, and He assured me I can’t take any of it with me.
