Seneca Seasons ― A Farm Boy Remembers

In Seneca Seasons, Larry Scheckel takes us to his boyhood days, growing up with eight siblings on the family farm in the hill country of southwestern Wisconsin. With both humor and grace, he shares his memories of seasonal farm life and the one-room country school out on Oak Grove Ridge, which was the social heart of the community, from the basket social to the Christmas program and the end-of-the-year school picnic. Join Scheckel on his nostalgic and evocative journey back to a simpler time when life revolved around family, farm, Church, and seasons.The is what Larry has to say about this memoir: “All the events in the book really happened, but the mind is not a video camera, so my stories are only as accurate as my memory. This memoir is a collection of impressions that still linger in my heart. When I was 18 years old, I left the farm and joined the Army. I was sent to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, in October 1960. After that, I often visited, but never again worked on the farm. Our Crawford County farm was located in the middle of Seneca Township. Called the Driftless area, it was roughed up by the glaciers 10,000 years ago. Hill country is where farmers plow the narrow ridge hilltops and the coulee bottoms. People think that all farm country is flat, and a lot of it is. If you look at a plat book or county road map of Iowa, you will see roads that are straight lines. That is flat country. But if you glance at a road map of Crawford County, the roads look like spaghetti on a plate. The roads follow the ridge tops and “are so crooked they could run for Congress,” we often joked. Most families on Oak Grove Ridge were either German, Norwegian, Irish or English. The Scheckels were German. People celebrated their heritage by keeping traditions alive. The Norwegians made their lefse flatbread and lutefisk and sent their children to Norwegian language summer schools. Germans were fond of their wurst sausages and ale beers. The Irish celebrated their music, St. Patrick’s Day, and their Catholic heritage. Saints and sinners lived on Oak Grove Ridge. Most attended a church of their chosen religion. The Scandinavians gravitated to the Lutheran Church. The Irish were partial to the Catholic faith. The Germans practiced both. Most people behaved themselves. Some drank more than they should. A few farmers treated their spouses and children harshly. Most people stayed married to the same mate their entire life. Divorce was a rarity. If a farmer found “a new lily to pollinate,” it was rumored he was “tilling other fields.” Nobody thought they were better than anybody else. Arguments and feuds rarely occurred. Everybody just tried to get along and get ahead. Farmers helped other farmers, especially if one was injured or sick. Late-summer threshing crews bound neighbors together. The sense of community was strong. The Oak Grove District #15 one-room country school was a focal point that drew all families together three times a year. Appropriately, it sat on a hill in the middle of Oak Grove Ridge. The children of those farmers mingled, worked together, learned together, and played together. Kids talked. There were few family secrets. Perhaps there were easier places to grow up in America in the 1940s and 1950s, but I’d pick the 238-acre farm on Oak Grove Ridge. The lessons learned from Dad, Mom, my brothers and sisters, the one-room country school, and St. Patrick’s Catholic Church have lasted me a lifetime. This narrative means to capture a slice of an unique era in Wisconsin history. It was the age when horses were supplanted by tractors and when a threshing band of neighbors was replaced by the combine. Through all these changes, though, the beat of the heartland, of its simple people and their direct ways, has remained ever the same. In the end, that is why that farm on Oak Grove Ridge has never stopped calling me home.”