“We worked through spring and winter, through summer and through fall,
But the mortgage worked the hardest and the steadiest of all.
It worked through nights and Sundays, through every holiday.
It settled down among us, and it never went away.”
— “The Farmer is the Man,” author unknown
On my way to visit Leo Kleine, I stopped at the intersection of 133rd Street and Calumet Avenue in the Brunswick neighborhood of Cedar Lake a few miles west of U.S. 41. To my left sat Reichert’s Tavern. Kitty-corner sat the shuttered Hudson dealership.
Fitting.
Kleine, 95, has lived in Brunswick all his life. He is a retired, one-legged farmer who has outlived two wives. On hand were his son, Paul, and daughter-in-law, Rose.
The letter “e” at the end of Leo’s surname is not silent.
***
“My older brother took his four sisters to church with a horse and buggy and when he came back he had a little brother,” Kleine began. “That was me. I was born in this house on a Sunday morning, Aug. 1, 1920. My brother was sure glad after all them girls.
“I was still in my teens when Dad and Ma passed. I had a younger brother and sister, too. One of my older sisters stayed and helped raise my younger siblings. There were eight of us kids all together. I only got to the eighth grade at Holy Name and that was it. Our lunch was froze before we got to school.”
Hard times.
“We were losin’ the farm. Dad had one payment left when he died. They were foreclosing. But we made it.”
That would’ve been a shame to lose the farm with just one payment left.
“Howkinson and Biesecker wanted to buy our land cheap through a sheriff’s sale. They were into real estate. Old man Howkinson was the vice president of the bank in Crown Point. But Adam Schafer from Cook, who had the one-pump gas station where Barney Wornhoff was on the corner, said: ‘Them kids is orphans, keep your damn nose out!'”
How long has the farm been in the family?
“Grandpa Kleine homesteaded 166 acres in 1892.”
What was your grandfathers given name?
“Franz.”
German Catholic?
“Yup.”
Brunswick during the Prohibition Era?
“At Reichert’s Tavern, they took the guts out of a player piano and put the booze in it. Benny Reichert told me he paid for his house and blacksmith shop in two years. They had an ice cream parlor upstairs and in the basement they had a roulette wheel and a poker table. Brunswick Dance Hall had big dances. People would come from all over.
“At the Brunswick Garage, (Charles) Schreiber invented the Nabon spark plug. But he went bankrupt. He got my dad and all the neighbors to invest. His son, Arnold Schreiber, sold Hudson automobiles.”
Did you buy Hudsons from Schreiber?
“No, we bought DeSotos from Schutz.”
The Great Depression?
“Well, corn got down to 10 cents a bushel. Pigs got down to 2 cents a pound. When I started voting at age 21 it cost me $1.25 poll tax every year. You had to pay to vote! My dad voted for FDR.
“In ’27 or ’28, when Al Smith and (Herbert) Hoover run against each other, the priest sent us home at noon to get our folks to vote for Smith because he was Catholic. I remember Hoover saying on the radio: ‘Vote for me, I’ll put two cars every garage and two chickens in every pot!’ Bull—!”
Continue, please.
“We used to husk the corn by hand. I’d milk cows. We quit milkin’ cows in about ’48. We farmed with horses until ’41 and usually had a colt every year. We got a 1941 H (International tractor) on Decoration Day. Yeah, we had chickens and ducks. We’d sell a few eggs. We had a couple sheep, so we had wool.”
Self-sustaining.
“During 1933 and ’34 it was bad drought years. My dad sold a Persian stallion to an outfit in Canada. We got $250 for him. With that money we bought hay from our relatives in Ohio. That’s how we kept the animals alive that year. I remember when we planted some barley in the marsh and the cinch bugs ate it all. The government gave us creosote to put around the edges of the field to help keep ’em out. Cinch bugs stink. They’d eat the early wheat, too.”
When did local farmers start growing soybeans?
“Uncle Herman had some in 1926 — 20 cents a bushel.”
Let me see your hands.
“Eh?”
Your hands.
“Oh, I got all 10 of them. But I only got one leg. Lost it about 20 year ago. I pulled a combination loader-backhoe up to the creek and was throwin’ big rocks from the bucket into the creek to help prevent erosion. I didn’t realize that I didn’t set the brake. I had my back to the machinery while throwing a rock in the creek when all of a sudden the loader bucket scooped me up and goes down the grade from about a 10-foot elevation. My leg was shattered underneath the bucket while I sat in the water.”
Mercy.
“I took the handles from a regular pair of pliers and dug my leg out. I lost some pieces of my leg in the water but didn’t realize it. I crawled a quarter-mile to the road and waved down the hired man, tellin’ him to take me back to the shop because I was hurt.”
That’s an understatement. Final thoughts on Brunswick during the “good old days”?
“This (Calumet Avenue) used to be Highway 41. The Greyhounds (buses) stopped here. From 1938 to 1943, my sister worked here in Brunswick where they made the violin strings. It was called Perfection Musical Strings. John Erikson from Sweden made the complete violin.
“We had the first lit ball diamond in the area — night ball games. The Cook team played northwest of where Walgreens is today. I was a catcher without a mask. And I got black eyes because of it.”
Was Abner Doubleday a pretty good ballplayer on that team?
“Eh?”
***
I took the ancient sodbuster’s photo next to his pride and joy, his vegetable garden. Hollyhocks — the flower many of our grandmothers planted — grew tall beside the old farmhouse where Kleine was born nearly a century ago.
As we shook hands goodbye, I told him it was a pleasure. With a twinkle in his eye, the old-timer told me: “I’ll see yuh in the funny papers!”
Salt of the earth, Leo Kleine.
Jeff Manes is a freelance columnist for the Post-Tribune.
