They hung in there for us

Jerry Barney

Published 06:00 a.m., June 21, 2009

As a teenager, I watched the slim, trim man pick up the heavy cases of eggs and effortlessly tote them to the truck to place them where they were supposed to be.

Other times, I watched him fatigued, as he dragged himself off of the couch after a quick supper and a short nap so he could go to his second or third job.

“Will I ever be the man he is?,” I asked myself.

The answer is no. I still don’t--and I’ll never--have the inner toughness or the resiliency of my dad. Or my father-in-law, either.

Clifford Barney and Irving Isaacson would each be 103 now

Now THEY were men. They didn’t have it easy. They spent their whole lives struggling through. Each only had an eighth grade education.

But they were self-educated wise men. They didn’t have a lot of material things. But they provided for their families. And they set good examples for us all, and for anyone who was aware of them.

Dad wanted to be a farmer. At age 6, he came to Minnesota from Illinois with his farmer-parents back when the farm economy was good.

Then it went bad. He got into farming on his own anyway, during the Great Depression. Eventually, economic realities dictated his exit from that occupation-life-style.

He worked a whole bunch of different jobs while we were growing up, sometimes two or three at a time. He worked at a hatchery, was a carpenter, egg trucker, welder, church janitor and cement trucker,among other things. He didn’t earn a lot of money, but we had food on our table (often eggs, from the hatchery), much-patched clothing to wear, and an old family car that was usually in some state of disrepair.

If the wolf ever came to our door, he would had to have brought a picnic lunch, for sure.

Things weren’t easy, but Dad kept hanging in there, and that was his most memorable quality.

Just give him his onions, his snuff and his polka music and he’d make it through.

Same deal with my wife Lois’ dad. He was able to maintain himself in farming throughout his life, but it wasn’t easy. (He started out as a “hired man” before farming on his own.) Even owning his own farm, he had to watch every penny. (The only time I ever saw this very gentle man become upset was when he thought something was being done that would require needless financial expenditures. “Frieda, you shouldn’t leave the burner on when there’s nothing on it,” he’d say in his delightful Norwegian accent.

Lois’ dad left us in ‘91 and my dad followed in ‘96. We’ll see them again someday, and I’ll have to remember to thank them again for “hanging in there” for us.

They may have been tempted to quit, but they didn’t. They had responsibilities for their families and to their communities. And they kept them. That, more than the ability to lift heavy egg cases, is the true measure of manhood, as far as I’m concerned.

Jerry Barney writes from his home in Fergus Falls. He is a former newspaper editor in Otter Tail County.

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