I remember it well.
Mobius in Hemingford held a hog-calling contest on September 10, 2004.
The competition was part of their customer appreciation barbeque.
There were only two competitors. Myself and my wife’s uncle, Arnold Jensen.
I won the contest and received a handsome plaque for my shameless efforts of sooie, sooie, sooie!
It was the first time I had indulged in such a vocal endeavor since I squealed in delight the day my first litter of pigs was born 50 years ago.
In the fall of 1973, my good buddy Ron Kubalek set me up in the pig business.
Ron loaned me one of his pregnant gilts. The arrangement was, I would feed and care for the gilt until she was ready to wean her babies, which traditionally is eight weeks after they are born. The gilt, a young Duroc, had a litter of ten. One pig died, and when it was time for the Ron to retrieve his gilt (now a sow), Ron also had his pick of the litter.
That left me with eight pigs, which I raised, showed at the county and state fairs, and then sold.
But back to the piglets’ birth. Ron recommended that when the gilt went into labor, I check on her every two hours.
Ron was worried that the new mama may lie down on some of her babies. It was late January 1974, and the weather was cold.
While Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me stay home from school on the gilt’s due-date, I did check on her every two hours during the night. None of the pigs came. I went to school the next day, and when I got home, I discovered she had farrowed a litter of ten.
I did get my time off from school though. The week of the birth of my pigs, a flu virus had knocked out over one-third of the Raymond Central High School student body. Lack of sleep had weakened my immune system, and the virus nailed me.
I missed two days of school, returned to class, got sick again, and missed another two days. Other than the classes I missed in the fall of 1969 when I was hospitalized with a kidney infection, my four days of “freshman-farrowing-influenza” in February 1974 was the most school I ever missed due to illness.
While I farrowed several litters of pigs during high school, I also struck it lucky birthing goats. It was common for my father to bring home a young goat or two from his employer (Norden Laboratories – now Pfizer in Lincoln) for me to raise as pets.
Among them was a male named Art.
I penned Art with a female goat named Nanny. Art and Nanny did their thing, and five months later she had quadruplets. The local paper, The Valparaiso Hi-Lites, published a front-page story and picture of me, Nanny, and her four babies.
At one point, my goat population grew to 13, which was nine too many. The goats were eating a lot of hay, and the pen wasn’t big enough to hold them all. I reduced the stock to two or three, and those goats were mostly pets.
I often would stake out Art and the other goats in several locations around the farmyard, and the goats would do a good job of eating the weeds.
Art grew to be a large goat that was very strong and extremely aggressive. Anyone who walked into his pen became subject to a painful gouging. While the female goats’ horns grew like the letter C toward their heads, Art’s grew up and outward, allowing him to hook his prey.
Art also had a problem with personal hygiene. He would often urinate all over himself, which led to an unbearable stench. However, the smell attracted female goats. If I rubbed up against Art, it meant taking a shower and tossing my clothes in the washing machine or fielding stench complaints from anyone I encountered.
The female goats were much cleaner and very passive. They were also entertaining. When I let the females and their kids run free around the farmyard, the goats would often jump on top of our cars and lie down and take a nap on the vehicle’s roof.
I also constructed a ramp that led to the roof of the chicken house, curing the goats’ yearning for higher altitudes. The older goats would flop down on their stomachs and chew their cuds for hours while sunning themselves on the chicken house roof, while the younger goats would often prance around their pen and climb up and down the ramps while kicking their hind legs in the air. It was an amusing sight to behold.
My family always had at least one goat on our farm between 1965 and 1985.
Art died when I was a young adult, and Dad mounted Art’s skull and horns on one of the walls of his garage.
I also have many adventures to tell of housing raccoons, donkeys, sheep, horses, 4-H show calves, dogs, cats, and a fish named Gladys, but space doesn’t allow.