I remember very little about our arrival in Alt Bergthal, Manitoba. We had come from Los Angeles in July or August 1930. Our 1927 Hudson Super Six raised long clouds of dust on the graded dirt road that passed by the school where my father, Jake Suderman, was to teach for the next four years. The school was located about one mile south and two and a half miles west of Altona, near the west bank of Buffalo Creek, which runs roughly north-south in this part of its course. It faced east, with a view of the one-sided street village of Alt Bergthal on the east bank. In between was the schoolyard, a level stretch which dropped down to the creek. On the yard were several buildings: the white-painted wood schoolhouse built in 1904, which housed both the one-room school at its south end, and the teacher’s living quarters at the north end. On the west side of the schoolhouse was a shelter belt of trees. A small barn and the customary outhouses for boys and girls skirted the north side of the yard.

I don’t recall what we slept on the first one or two nights, since we arrived without any furniture, but it was probably camping gear. My mother, Marie, probably cooked on the portable Coleman gas stove we had used during our treks to and from California. What is unforgettable is the bites all over our bodies in the morning. Suspecting bed bugs, our parents lay awake the second night armed with a flashlight. When the biting and scratching began they lit up and confirmed a multitude of the pests. The decision was quickly made to go on a camping trip to Seven Sisters Falls on the Winnipeg River. But first Dad drove to Altona to buy a large quantity of sulphur and a wash tub. After checking for bedbugs in all the clothes and bedding we were going to use while away, Dad closed all the outside doors and windows and, leaving the inside doors open, set fire to the sulphur in the tub in the kitchen. When we returned after several days, he thoroughly aired the building, and we had no further problems with bed bugs.

Our living quarters were very modest in size and lacked amenities we now take for granted. The single bedroom on the second floor, under a gable roof, was cramped and lacked privacy. A standard full-size mattress on the floor slept the three of us children, my two younger sisters at one end and I at the other. Lightly curtained off was our parents’ bed, next to the gable window. This arrangement grew increasingly impractical with time.

The main floor had two rooms: the kitchen with a trap door in the floor and steps to a cellar below, and the living room, which soon accommodated a heavy, upright Williams piano, piano stool, chesterfield, and jardinière (fern or flower stand), plus a chair or two.

Near the south end of the wall separating the living room and kitchen was a connecting door, and beside it a curious square opening in the wall near the floor. We found out later that its purpose was to enable a cat to run from one room to the other in chase of a mouse or rat, with the door closed.

Another door opened from the living room to the central hallway in the school. This was very convenient, of course, for the daily routine of going to school, for doing the janitorial work, and for pushing the piano into the school for the annual Christmas concert. On such occasions Mother would accompany the singing of Christmas carols by the children and/or the whole congregation. This was a novel experience fondly remembered by some of the students many years later.

Among our first purchases were a cow and a few chickens to provide milk, eggs, and meat. It was my responsibility to look after the barn and the cow, and to do the milking. As soon as possible we acquired a cream separator to provide cream and skim milk, and a wooden butter churn to make butter and buttermilk. Our father was very partial to buttermilk, claiming it was good for his health. Cranking the cream separator was always a pleasure for me. I marveled at how the milk poured into it and spun around could flow out of two spouts as milk and cream. Years later, as a biochemist, I would use the same principle in a centrifuge to separate the various components of blood into red cells, white cells, and serum.

Dad was my teacher these four years. Although I should have been placed in Grade 4 the first year, he placed me in Grade 5. His reasoning was simple. He knew my grounding in Grades 1 and 2, taken in Rosenfeld, had been good. He also considered my Grade 3, taken in four different, large schools in the greater Los Angeles area, to have been quite advanced, at least in some subjects. Furthermore, I’m sure he would have felt, as I do now, that a one-room school in which the first eight grades are taught provides a learning experience of a unique kind: a constant review of lessons one has learned in previous grades as well as a preview of what lies ahead (up to and including Grade 8). Thus, anything I would have missed by not taking the Manitoba Grade 4 could be corrected by paying attention to the pertinent Grade 4 lessons as they came up. There was usually time for such digression from assigned seat work.

As already mentioned, Dad, who had taught in one- and two-roomed schools in Manitoba for some eighteen years, had been greatly impressed with the educational innovations in Los Angeles schools which my sister Margaret and I had attended. The influence of Hollywood had been very strong there. Remembering my accounts of educational and comic movies being shown in Grade 3, usually on Friday afternoons, he resolved to introduce such learning aids on his return to teaching in Manitoba schools.

Always a man of action, Dad drove to Winnipeg, at his own expense, to contact officials in the Department of Education. After persuading them of his desire to spread the benefits of visual education via movies in the insular Mennonite communities, he gained access to many films in the department’s library. It helped that the Minister of Education was a Mr. Miller from Gretna. And so, Dad was soon showing silent movies of the United States national parks, some foreign films, and cartoons to evening audiences assembled in country schools. Charlie Chaplin was universally popular. I cannot remember whether Canadian-made films were available at that time. Dad would provide the commentary and draw attention to special points of interest on the screen. It was my job to collect the admission fee, ten or fifteen cents, at the door, and to crank the sixteen millimetre film projector by hand.

My sisters have their own recollections. Margaret began Grade 2 and Irma Grade 1, although she was only five and a half years old. Apparently the school inspector had decided in the fall term that she might as well be enrolled since she attended classes anyway and was eager to learn. All three of us thought Dad was a good teacher, albeit somewhat strict. Margaret fondly remembers how he encouraged her artistic efforts. She took up painting as a hobby in adult life and some of her work graces the homes of her children, grandchildren, and others. Irma did likewise. Corporal punishment was standard for serious or repeated misdemeanors. Irma recollects that another boy and I received spankings one day. It seems that somehow the school bell’s clanger was missing when Dad wanted to ring the class to order. He was not amused. On another occasion I accidentally threw a stone through a school window, something a teacher’s son definitely should not do. To make the point, Dad employed the regulation strap very effectively on the seat of my pants and had me stand in the corner for good measure. I also received instructions and practice on how to remove glass shards from the window frame and how to putty in a new pane. On a more pleasant note, one day a Grade 1 classmate of Irma, curly headed Tom Funk, had fallen asleep at his desk with his head on his right arm. Ever quick with his trusty old Kodak 1A folding camera, Dad snapped a picture. Minutes later, Tom woke up and Dad clicked another quick shot of the startled young lad.

Other former Alt Bergthal students of the early ’30s have shared their memories of those times. Eva (Klippenstein) Doerksen recalled a mishap to Irma. While running down the creek bank, Irma’s foot caught in a gopher hold and she fell, breaking her collar bone as we found out later. As Irma tells it, when Dad was informed and heard her cry, he borrowed a horse and buggy from the Peter Duecks after school to take her to the doctor in Altona, the road being too muddy for cars. Eva also spoke highly of Dad as her teacher. She remembers him bringing out a “large box” and playing on it some of the 78- r.p.m. records in the music appreciation set prescribed by the Manitoba Department of Education. This left her with a lasting appreciation of the classical repertoire. I too fondly remember especially certain pieces, e.g., Schubert’s dramatic “The Erl-King” sung by a boy soprano who evoked the terror in the young boy’s dream; also “In a Monastery Garden,” by Ketèlbey, an elegant orchestral piece, and another in which all the various instruments of the orchestra were singled out to play well-known solos. We were introduced also to selected arias and choruses from the great operas. As Eva observed, this probably went over the heads of most of the pupils, who were used to simple hymns sung in German in various churches in the area.

The core curriculum, especially in the primary grades, stressed the three Rs – reading, writing, and arithmetic. The Canadian Reader, a graded series, with old-fashioned stories of trolls and Aesop’s Fables in the lower grades, and some poetry in the higher grades, such as “In Flanders Fields,” may have raised some questions in young minds shaped by Mennonite values, but no doubt helped raise awareness of the Britishness of the homeland adopted by the Mennonites some sixty years earlier. (The introduction of the Dick and Jane series of readers in the 1940s seemed to me to mark the acceptance of the US as our cultural model.) Daily writing practice and arithmetic drills sharpened our skills and minds. Friday afternoons were often devoted in part to spelling contests, reading stories, music, or drawing. The last half hour was devoted to religion; this usually meant reading from Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible. If memory serves, the first half hour of every morning was spent on extracurricular instruction in the German language, using Die Fiebel as the introductory textbook and the Bible for more advanced students.

One topic not taught in those days was sex education. Although there was a course in physiology, health, and hygiene in one of the upper grades, it left out any mention of sex. For children raised on the farm this was probably not a serious omission from the curriculum. They learned soon enough that what seemed to be a rooster beating up on some poor hen was in fact a necessary attack if they were to get fertile eggs which could be hatched by the maternally inclined hen. Also, talk around the dinner table might centre around the necessity of getting a cow bred again if that cow was to continue giving milk. There might be talk of which bull in the neighbourhood would be a suitable mate. Not every farmer would keep a bull, since a bad-tempered one might gore its owner to death. Likewise, although much farm work was still done with horses, few farmers dared keep a stallion. It was quite common to see stallions considered to have good lineage crisscross the countryside pulling their owner or manager in a sulky (a two-wheeled vehicle). When one of these pulled up at a farm there was usually quite a bit of excitement. The older boys and young men usually studied the action when a young filly or mare was introduced to the stallion. The success of the mission was later communicated to the older girls and women, with the expressed hope of having a new foal the following year.

And so it came to pass that when my parents noticed signs of puberty in me, Dad sent me off with our cow and brief instructions to a pre-arranged tryst with a neighbour’s bull. The bull’s owner/manager did the introductions and let nature take its course. I was suitably impressed by the bull’s endowments, or maybe I should say awed, and later reported that everything had gone according to plan. My father, however, must have felt he should leave nothing to chance and shortly thereafter presented me with a copy of a book called What Every Young Boy Should Know. This attempted to explain some of the dreams I was having and the strange changes taking place in my body, and warned of the consequences of playing with fire. There was a series of such books, including, of course, What Every Girl Should Know.

In fall and spring the older boys and girls played softball or football, while the younger girls skipped rope and played other games such as “pom-pom pull away” or hopscotch at recess. In winter the skates would come out as soon as ice on the creek was thick enough. Unless too much snow covered the ice, we could skim along the creek for perhaps a quarter of a mile or more in long graceful strides. From that wonderful Grade 4 geography text Boys and Girls Around the World we learned that skating was a favourite pastime in the Netherlands, our ancestral homeland. Another favourite sport for us was to create an ice runway down the creek bank on the schoolyard and partly up the opposite side of the creek by pouring water on the ground and letting it freeze. Holding small sleighs, we would run as fast as we could, throw ourselves down on the sleigh, and race downhill, across the creek, and up the other side as far as we could go. We also used larger, more sedate, double-running sleighs made by Mr. John Klippenstein. On these deluxe vehicles two or three kids could share the thrill of a somewhat slower ride, sitting up and avoiding jolts to their stomachs. Sometimes the spring melt left large puddles on the land. When these froze we had more skating opportunities. Building snow forts behind the school was exciting stuff too. The windbreak ensured that the blinding blizzards we endured from time to time would leave us with the deep, densely packed snowbanks to be exploited for our play. When the weather was too unpleasant for outdoor activities, we would play indoor games such as rummy, crokinole, or checkers during recess and lunch hour.

The school library was located in the southeast corner of the school, to the left of the teacher’s desk at the front centre of the room. It was a single cabinet, about three feet wide and six feet high, and held about a hundred books, I would guess. Dad added quite a few volumes, usually bought second-hand in Winnipeg or elsewhere.

I remember reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, With Wolfe in Canada, several of James Fenimore Cooper’s historical novels, such as The Last of the Mohicans, and a number of Alexandre Dumas’s novels, including The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask. There was a series called “Makers of History” with subjects like Mary, Queen of Scots as well as less weighty mysteries and romances. Two well-thumbed favourites were Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. By the time we left Alt Bergthal I had read most of these, some of them several times. Dad read Tom Sawyer to the whole school. I don’t recall if the library had any copies of the National Geographic when we arrived, but it certainly did in the next few years. Dad was also an avid reader of the news and would bring home copies of the weekend edition of the Chicago Herald and Tribune, purchased at the D. W. Friesen & Sons store in Altona (the forerunner of the present very successful and widely known Friesens Corporation). These found their way into the school room from time to time. I remember being captivated by a feature article on the search for Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat.

Buffalo Creek became the focus of many of our leisure time activities in summer. My chums, the three boys from the John Klippenstein family, Simon, Menno, and Waldo, and I would go swimming at the north end of the village, opposite the John Wieler residence. Sometimes their two cousins, Ted and Raymond Friesen, the youngest sons of D. W. Friesen of Altona, would join us for something to do on a warm, lazy Sunday afternoon. We built rafts out of old logs or scrap lumber and pretended Buffalo Creek was the mighty Mississippi River of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn fame. Other folks from the Peter Klippenstein family and their relatives or friends might come along in their homemade galvanized steel rowboat with its airtight flotation compartment.

The east bank of Buffalo Creek opposite the school ground became the site of at least two baptismal ceremonies during the 1930–1934 years. The participants were probably members of the Mennonite Brethren denomination, which practices baptism by immersion, and came from another community. Local people were descendants of the Bergthal Colony in southern Russia who migrated to Canada in 1874; they practiced baptism by sprinkling. Some fifty years later, on a trip to Israel, it struck me how similar Buffalo Creek is to the Jordan River in the area north of the Sea of Galilee. Both wander lazily across flat land, flanked by tall reeds or grasses and fairly low banks.

In fall duck hunters would sometimes come to Buffalo Creek. On one occasion I was standing in the doorway of the shed attached to our living quarters when I heard shots being fired. Pellets whizzed past me, apparently having ricocheted off the water. One or two hit the door frame. We let the hunters know, and after that they moved away.

In summer or fall the villagers prepared fuel for the winter from manure collected from the barns. Manure mixed with straw and water to form a thick sludge was shovelled into a machine built on the principle of a meat grinder, and forced through a horizontal slot. The emerging flat stream, probably about eight inches wide and two or three inches thick was cut with a spade into brick-sized pieces which were piled up in rows in a sunny location to dry and harden. A pungent aroma permeated the kitchens or living rooms of the housebarns when these bricks were burned.

Our family never had to use manure bricks. We used wood or coal in our kitchen stove. The school, however, used only cord wood which would be cut up into shorter lengths by one of the men from the village. His pay was $5 per eight-hour day, as I recall.

One of the popular events in the greater Altona area was the Altona Fall Fair. Women vied for honours in cooking, sewing, biggest pumpkin, and so on. Irma remembers our mother winning first prize for butter and second prize for lemon pie; she lost marks for little droplets on the meringue.

My entry in the fair was a Jersey heifer. I walked her all the way from Alt Bergthal, about two and a half miles, and in due time she was awarded second prize. I then walked her back home, elated and rewarded for my participation in the 4-H Club. My heifer, I’m sure, just felt tired.

Among the amusements offered at the fair was an airplane ride, courtesy of Mr. Frank Sawatzky, who came from Steinbach with his homemade, open-cockpit biplane. Always ready to try something new, Dad donned a helmet and pair of goggles and up he went, fully confident that Frank knew what he was doing.

One summer Dad canvassed on behalf of Howard Winkler of Morden in his campaign to become the Liberal candidate for the federal riding of Lisgar. Mr. Winkler was successful and went on to retain his seat as MP for several terms. The two men knew each other personally, since Mr. Winkler’s large residence at the south end of Morden bordered on the market garden belonging to Dad’s parents. My own interest at the time was less about politics than in Mr. Winkler’s elegant Lincoln sedan and its thirsty five-miles-per-gallon gasoline consumption.

I came to appreciate something of the indomitable optimism and entrepreneurial character of my father during these first years of the Great Depression. I think it was after our first year in Alt Bergthal that he decided we should have better lighting than that provided by kerosene lamps. Manitoba Hydro had not yet brought electricity to rural Manitoba, but a few well-to-do farmers were using thirty-two volt generators which could charge six six-volt batteries. He obtained a tall steel tower and a generator, and built his own airplane-type propeller and tail assembly. With some help from me he erected the whole apparatus in the northwest corner of the school property. The first strong wind had the propeller going too fast and it flew apart. He then obtained a properly designed airplane propeller and himself devised a governor which automatically turned the propeller out of the wind if it blew too hard. This system, with the six car batteries located in the shed attached to the living quarters, worked well. A year or two after Dad’s success, a wind charger company in the States came out with a commercial product. However, large-scale application of this concept was side-lined after World War II by mass distribution of hydroelectric power and power generated by coal-fired systems and nuclear power. Now, in the twenty-first century, wind power is coming into its own again, as it should.

Dad’s salary of $500 per year, paid in ten monthly installments, never seemed to meet the needs or wants of our family. An extra $5 per month for looking after janitorial services helped a bit. But we had furniture to buy. And a cow, feed, cream separator, butter churn and clothes for a growing family. And we had been without a piano since leaving Rosenfeld in 1929. Mother rightly felt it should be replaced because the piano had been a wedding present from her parents. It also seemed I had inherited her interest in music. Dad would therefore see to it that I could start piano lessons in Altona. How did our parents manage all this and more?

Mother did her bit. She made and re-made clothes for all of us, except Dad’s clothing. (A suit, white shirt, and tie were a male teacher’s uniform, a badge of authority.) She did a lot of patching. She also maintained a vegetable garden and even grew some flowers. We grew our own potatoes, beets, carrots, beans, peas, and cucumbers, and picked raspberries, gooseberries, and strawberries at our grandparents’ farm in Morden. Some of this produce she preserved in glass jars for the winter or stored in sawdust in the earth cellar under the kitchen floor. When wild chokecherries were in season we gorged on pies and pancakes, a reward for the effort required to find and pick them. But moderation in food consumption was the normal order of the day. Our allotted portions were such that none of us carried an ounce of fat.

Mom also made a rich, potent chokecherry wine. This would be shared with close friends and visiting relatives. On one occasion she threw out the leftover mash from the fermentation to our few chickens in the yard. Soon they started to behave strangely, lurching bizarrely, toppling over, passing out momentarily, coming to, and trying to get back on their feet. Their behaviour was almost as amusing as watching a Charlie Chaplin movie.

In late fall, after some frosty weather, some of the villagers would get together for a pig-killing bee. Dad would purchase part of a pig and we would then participate in the operations leading to the finished products, including mouth-watering smoked sausages.

Dad found all sorts of ways to earn extra money. He was very inventive, as I’ve already suggested above with his wind-electric project. As an adolescent, I thought my father could do almost anything he put his mind to. Several examples illustrate my point.

Dad would salvage lead from batteries. Not able to afford the costly maintenance of their cars which had not reached the reliability standards of today, some people simply converted them to horse-drawn “Bennett wagons,” named after the prime minister most closely associated with the Great Depression. Surplus batteries were thus readily available for a pittance and Dad collected quite a number of them, some for use with his wind-electric system. Others were re-purposed. After simply dumping the sulphuric acid on the ground, a most environment-unfriendly act by today’s standards, it was my job to break the lead plates out of the battery case and give them to Dad to melt in a large iron ladle over an outdoor fire. Each ladle held about ten pounds of the molten lead. This he poured into some kind of mold to cool and solidify. He would sell the bricks on the next trip to Winnipeg. I still have a forty-pound dumbbell made from ladle-shaped pieces.

Dad also hauled cordwood. He and Mother’s brother-in-law, Jake Hiebert from Kane, who owned a two-ton Ford truck, headed into the forested area east of the Red River, around Richer, to buy cordwood for re-sale back home. They made quite a few successful trips, but the venture ended shortly after a near-disaster, when the loaded truck began sinking into the swampy terrain.

A similar, short-lived undertaking involved buying surplus boxcars in Winnipeg or Transcona and selling them to farmers to use as granaries. I sometimes marvel at how hard Dad and Uncle Jake worked and what marketing strategy they used, all for so little profit.

Having been raised on a farm in the nearby community of Neu Hoffnung (New Hope), Dad was familiar with grain harvesting. In August he would confidently exchange his teacher’s suit for a threshing master’s overalls and direct the crew of a local threshing operation. The outfit belonged to Mr. Peter Klippenstein. Dad himself drove the enormous tractor, a steam-driven model if I remember correctly, hauling the threshing machine from field to field. On occasion he had to cross Buffalo Creek over the wooden bridge near the school. The bridge would shake mightily as the heavy cleats on the huge steel wheels hit the decking. I would cling to the railing and hope for the best. On that same railing I burned my initials with a magnifying glass, using the focused rays of the hot sunlight.

Due to depressed financial circumstances after two or three years of drought and grasshoppers, some farmers could no longer afford telephone service. Seeing an opportunity to earn a few extra dollars, Dad bought a disused section of telephone line somewhere southwest of Alt Bergthal and dismantled it. His method was very simple. A long chain was hooked around the base of the telephone pole to be removed, then strung over the top of a two-pole fulcrum and attached to the front bumper of our Hudson. While Dad reversed the Hudson to tug the pole out of the ground, I guided it to a safe fall. I can’t remember how many poles we brought down this way. We sold them to the railroads for recycling into railway ties, and found buyers for the wire, crossbars, and glass insulators. The profit was meagre at best.

My father also conducted sightseeing tours. His insatiable curiosity found an outlet in taking teachers on trips. Having been to California and Chicago, and having visited many national parks in the western US, he thought it would benefit other teachers in the Mennonite community to be similarly enlightened about our neighbours and advanced institutions to the south. And so, for an all-expenses-paid fee of seventy-five dollars per person, he would introduce three teachers per trip to the wonders of places like the Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest in Arizona, Redwood and Yosemite National Parks in California, Zion National Park in Utah, and Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks in Wyoming. He was driver, tour guide, photographer, chief cook, and bottle washer, and the one who pitched the big green tourist tent for the night in campsites along the way. Among his clients, all old friends, were Bernard Klippenstein (Peter’s son), John Schellenberg from Neu Hoffnung, and Frank Brown, a former student of Dad’s. In a role reversal, by the way, Frank taught Dad some Grade 11 or Grade 12 subjects in Altona at some point during the early ’30s to enable Dad to upgrade his teaching certificate; later Frank taught in the Winkler High School where I became one of his pupils in high school. These guided trips lasted at least three or four weeks since cruising speed was only about forty-five to fifty-five miles per hour and roads were not as wide or safe as they are now, particularly through the Rocky Mountains.

Dad also conducted shorter tours to Chicago in both 1933 and 1934. The major attractions were the wonderful exhibits of advances in science and technology at the 1933–1934 Chicago World’s Fair and the magnificent displays at the Field Museum of Natural History and the Chicago Zoo.

The rest of the family was more or less in limbo while Dad was away. Mother had her gardening, washing, meal-making, mending, and dusting. Since there were cracks around the doors and windows of our living quarters, any Dust Bowl wind blowing over the parched fields all around would leave everything in the house with a coating of fine dust, much to Mom’s disgust.

I did a lot of cow-herding along road allowances, since there was not much grass on the school yard. This occasionally took Bessie and me as far as the old Indian Mound to the northwest of the school. It seemed to be much higher than when I revisited it several times some fifty or sixty years later. I always wondered then, and still do, what stories lie buried there.

Bessie had a mind of her own. Probably upset by my rough milking, and thinking the grass was greener in the USA, she headed in that direction one day when I wasn’t paying attention. Problem was, I hadn’t seen her escape and didn’t know how long she had been gone. After looking for her frantically, and concerned for the seat of my pants, I finally told Dad what had happened. To my surprise, he didn’t seem too upset. Together we cruised around for a while in the Hudson asking people whether they had seen a Jersey cow on the loose. Finally one person remembered seeing one heading south on the road almost a mile east of the school. By the time we caught up to her she only a mile or two from the US boundary, somewhere in the vicinity of the old Post Road. After being fitted with a halter and tethered to the back bumper of the Hudson, she was marched home in a no-nonsense style. The heavy flywheel of the Hudson kept us moving smoothly in high gear with hardly a pause when Bessie balked. Neither of us were much the worse for the experience.

I had lots of time to observe nature in Alt Bergthal. Red-winged blackbirds and meadowlarks were everywhere. Every so often a blue heron would stand poised on one leg among the reeds in shallow parts of the creek. Water under the bridge teemed with crayfish, tadpoles, salamanders, and small fish. One summer the grasshoppers were so numerous they stripped a whole field of green grain in hours. I saw how they arrived in clouds, flying high, their wings glistening in the bright sun. The road was littered with battered carcasses of the voracious little beasts which had been hit by passing vehicles.

How could I forget the gophers, moles, and garter snakes? Gophers provided plenty of excitement and amusement. And income. You would see one of these cute striped ground squirrels stand up straight at the entrance of its tunnel and look you squarely in the eye as if to say, “Okay, Sampson, throw your stone.” If your aim was good but missed, it dived into its tunnel. A few moments later it would pop out of the other end of the tunnel and dare you to try again. This could be fun at first, but kids like me soon got serious about the business at hand. Gophers had a price on their tails, namely one cent per tail. To capitalize on this we needed to end their saucy taunting. We would fetch some creek water in a pail and pour it into one end of the tunnel and then quickly run to the other end to club the poor soaked gopher to sudden death in the manner now decried by animal rights activists concerning the killing of seal pups. We also used spring-type leg traps, especially farther away from the creek, to increase our yield. Sometimes we would find only a leg in the trap, chewed off by the escapee. We would take the gopher tails to the municipal office in Altona where the clerk would reward us according to our industriousness or cruelty, as you please. The general public in those days was not squeamish. Gophers and their treacherous holes were considered a threat to the well-being of humans, horses, cows, sheep, and goats. Humane society and animal rights organizations were not known in that part of the country. The much larger moles were in one sense not quite as bad as the gophers. At least one could easily see the piles of earth next to their large holes. These were more of a threat to horses with larger hoofs and a hazard to farm machinery which might bump into the hole or over the little mound. The lurching could throw the operator off his seat. A mole tail there fetched five cents. A paper bag full of gopher and mole tails paid for my first skates, a pair of learner skates that strapped onto one’s shoes and had bobsled-like double blades for stability.

Harmless garter snakes were very common. They seemed to slither out from nowhere when you least expected it. You might even encounter them in the creek, making their way across the surface faster than on the ground. As kids, we treated them with the disrespect we thought their due as biblical tempters of humankind almost from day one. We might stuff the smaller ones into our pockets only to let them out to startle some poor unsuspecting soul, such as the girl you were trying to impress.

Sundays were days of rest, at least for most of the Mennonite folk in southern Manitoba. A church service in the morning was de rigueur for the majority. Our family’s attendance was sporadic, no doubt because Dad’s membership in the Mennonite Brethren church was a bit sub-standard. He had married a Bergthaler and she was not allowed to take part in communion with the Brethren, so from time to time we would attend almost any church.

Once or twice we visited the Rudnerweide church a few miles west of the Alt Bergthal school. Services started early, at 10 or 10:30 a.m., and were conducted in the Low German dialect commonly spoken in the West Reserve, except for Bible readings or quotations which were given in Luther’s High German. One or more lay ministers sitting on a raised platform were separated from the congregation by a low railing across part of the front of the room. Two faiah saenga [Väasenja] (Vorsänger in German, song leaders in English) were seated in front of the railing, one to the right and one to the left. On cue from the presiding minister, they would stand and begin to sing the melody of the prescribed hymn with a peculiar, ringing nasal voice (to my ears), which many years later I came to associate with the sound of bagpipes, and which sounded like drawn out “hinnahh…hinnahh…s.” The correct pitch having been set, the congregation responded in unison, singing the words with an intensity of feeling I will not forget. Musical instruments, such as a piano or organ, were not used, being considered too worldly.

Sunday afternoons were often spent visiting neighbours or having them over. These were nearly always impromptu affairs, since few people had phones. They might pop in, attracted by Dad’s latest innovations or Mother’s delectable meals. One frequent drop-in was another teacher, the bachelor Bernard Klippenstein, who enjoyed Dad’s take on the events of the day and Mom’s chocolate cake.

We might visit Dad’s parents in Morden, where they operated a market garden on Railway Street, on a site later occupied by the Aylmer Canning Company. It was in the workshed attached to the modest two-storey house that we kids learned about many of the different jobs associated with a market garden. Usually we would meet uncles, aunts, and cousins there, some of whom visited me and my wife, Wilma, fifty or sixty years later in Guelph.

Sometime in 1933 it was decided that I could begin music lessons. I believe I had twenty-five lessons over a two-year period, but it was a start. These entailed a walk or ride to Altona and, if I remember correctly, thirty-five cents per lesson. My piano teacher was Hilda Buhr, who came from Gretna weekly to accommodate her Altona students. Her father was Mr. Peter Buhr, a well-known Chevrolet dealer in Gretna.

The Eaton’s catalogue listed bicycles for some $20 to $25, sometimes on sale for $18.95. I really longed to have one. Well, after two or three years, I was the proud possessor of an Eaton’s Road King and began racing up and down country roads, occasionally to Altona.

Dad had a weakness for big cars. New ones were out of the question, but good used models were available in Chicago. So one day he drove down and traded the aging Hudson for a Chrysler Imperial, the largest model available from Chrysler. It was a gorgeous, spacious car in its day, but soon proved to be too thirsty for gas. So he made another switch, this time to a most impractical but sporty two-door coupe, either a Ford or a Chevrolet, with a rumble seat. I think Mother must have thrown a fit after a few dusty trips with two or three kids crowded into that rumble seat. We soon had a more humble Ford sedan.

After four years in Alt Bergthal, Dad seemed to think it was time for a change. He used to say that four years in a one-room school was the limit. Very few teachers, he argued, had all the qualities required to produce well-rounded students. He himself lacked musical ability, he would say. Better to give the school a change. The next teacher might make up for his deficiencies. That’s what he said, at any rate. Anyhow, Mother always seemed a little dissatisfied with the isolation and limitations of village life.

My own view for many years has been that Dad was thinking about our future schooling. Although he never said so to me, he may have thought I could continue into Grade 9 in Alt Bergthal by way of correspondence courses from the Department of Education. More likely, however, he thought back to my year in California, which he had considered so broadening in educational terms, and therefore decided it would be better for all three of his children to receive further schooling in a larger school with more facilities and opportunities for extracurricular activities.

A completely different reason for our departure from Alt Bergthal was advanced by one of Irma’s classmates, Eva (Klippenstein) Doerksen, in correspondence I had with her in 2003 concerning our four years there. She claims that Dad got into trouble with certain people in the district who objected to the Sunday School classes Dad had started, resulting in his contract not being renewed. About the same time I learned from other sources that Dad had also started a Sunday School in Burwalde many years earlier. Thus it may be that Dad was seen as trying to introduce Mennonite Brethren Church – inspired dogma. The MB approach, with its emphasis on a personal conversion experience may have clashed with the thinking of some, such as the Russellites in the local community. Although Dad wasn’t preachy on the subject, he didn’t shy away from expressing his views. I did memorize two hundred Bible verses one year in a Canadian Bible Institute program.

Whatever the reasons for leaving Alt Bergthal, and they probably included all those given above, the decision was made to move to the town of Winkler. Mother’s brother-in-law, Jake Hiebert, came from Kane with his truck to take our furniture and belongings to a modest, older residence. Moving the large, heavy piano was the toughest part of the job, but he and Dad managed it, with a bit of help from me. I have no idea what happened to Dad’s wind-electric generating system.

Mother was the happiest to make the move, but for us three children, there was some sadness in leaving a community where we had made some good friends. What Dad’s private thoughts were, we don’t know. I don’t even know if he had his next job lined up.