These are the last two episodes that I will share from my Grandpa’s typed memoirs. He mentions a few other incidents involving some car accidents and fender benders, but those all took place in the 1950s and 1960s. I am still deciphering some of his handwritten materials.
Nothing worthy of mentioning in the way of accidents until the spring of 1927. This may not be worth mentioning, but I am still puzzled as to what was supposed to have happened. I was teaching at Broadview College at this time. I also had the responsibility of supervising the dairy. The two students that had done the milking for the school year had gone home for the summer. I had no one readily available for the job, so took on the job of milking the 22 cows then being milked until I could locate some one to do it. I had to get up at 3:00 A.M. to get the milk cared for at the proper time. This certain morning when I went to call the cows into the barn to shut them into their stations, the bull was standing near the barn door. He was a young Holstein and he was so gentle that we regarded him as a pet. I threw my arm around his neck and started to walk across the yard with him to drive the cows to the barn. He reached down with his head and before I could realize what was happening he threw me up on top of his head and started to run down the hill with me. Each time I tried to get off of his head, he would balance me back squarely on the crown of his head. I finally decided that he had me hopelessly balanced on his head. I reached for his eye, and as soon as I had it well located, I jammed my thumb into it as hard as I could. He shook his head to dislodge my thumb and shook me off his head. I ran to the barn as fast as I could, and he after me. I got there first and grabbed a pitchfork that stood beside the door and jammed it into his head as hard as I could. He would back off and then come at me attain. This went on for some ten minutes when he finally gave up, and I never heard a bull bellow as he did. I have no idea as to what his intentions were, but did not risk finding out. Needless to say we kept him penned up after that. As soon as it was day, I learned that a farmer nearby had been gored to death by his bull getting him cornered in a manger that morning.
When I was on the farm, I had a hen with about 30 small chickens running loose in the back yard. A thunderstorm was brewing, and I went out to get her and the chickens into a coop. The hen ran with her chicks up into a grove of willows. She ran under a tree and I was trying to get her out, when a flash of lightening nearly blinded me. When I recovered enough to know what had happened, I saw that the lightening had struck the tree and knocked it to pieces. The hen and chickens were all lying on their backs with nearly all the feathers picked off of them. I hastened away and left them lie till after the rain was over. I had not felt the shock as I was wearing my father’s rubber boots. If it had not been for the rubber boots, I well realized that I would have been lying with the hen and chicks.
Tuples and Attributes 