No Room for Lazy People - Ralph Kangas
New Ipswich Historical Society
FINNS: An Oral History of Finnish-Americans in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region
Excerpted from FINNS: An Oral History... by Patricia Kangas Ktistes, 1997, all rights reserved.
Ralph Kangas
They were still working the Kangas family farm when I was little. My father would go down to Whitney’s, work all day, come home at night, milk the cows, put the milk in coolers, pasteurize it and everything, and then he’d sell it to George Lanthier, who would peddle it all around town. I think there were only about seven cows. Diana, Rosalika; those are the two I remember. And people used to come to the house and buy milk and cream. My father also had cans of soda. “Wow! A can of soda inthe milk room?!” A can of soda for a nickel.
We also had pigs and chickens. I remember cutting chickens’ heads off in the back room next to the house. We’d hold the chicken, cut the head off, and throw it out through the door into the front yard with it flopping around. And my mother would boil the water and we’d have to put the chicken into the water and pluck the feathers. That’s where the outhouse was and the sauna, in the back room.
My mother never allowed us to go out into the barn and be around the cows and get messy during the week. She would tell my father, “I don’t want these boys going to school smelling like barn manure.” We weren’t allowed to milk the cows. But my mother always made us pick blueberries at Koivula’s. On a beautiful hot summer day. We’d pick blueberries, working hard with the big buckets and you’d be picking and thinking something’s weird around here. Turn around and there would be the Koivula boys; they’d sneak up on you.
I remember people saying our Grandmother [Sannamaija] Kangas was a hardworking woman. Very heavy. If you left fatty meats on your plate or grease, she would take a piece of bread and sop it all up and eat it. She ate everything left over. That’s why I think she had her heart attack. But they said she was a very nice, kind person.
On weekends my brother and I could go into the barn. We would have to open up the trap door and shovel the manure under the barn. And in the summer we had to help, shoveling manure into the spreader. We could go out in the fields and walk in the cow flaps with bare feet—squish it between our toes—but that was summertime.
We used to love watching my father and grandfather work, bringing hay into the barn. After my grandfather’s accident, things slowed down. I think my father tried to carry it on but found he couldn’t do it anymore. Must have been about ’57 or ‘58 I saw the accident. What would happen was my father would pull the hay wagon into the barn and uncouple it and drive straight through the barn and come out the other end. He’d hook up to a rope that was on this track that would come down from the ceiling and hook up the hay. So the hook would come down, my grandfather would pull the hook down, and it would open up and get a big hunk of hay and he would stand there, holding this rope. My father would hook the rope to the tractor and pull it forward. It would come up, hit that thing, and—zhoom—shoot right down there. It would hit a clipping or something or get to a certain point and they would yank on the rope and that would separate the hooks and the hay would come down. The hooks would open up and the hay would drop in the proper place. Well, they were pulling the hay up, and on the front entrance of the barn there’s a cement apron. My grandfather was standing up on it and he pulled the rope. The rope snapped. He fell back and hit his head on the cement. And I remember them trying to call an ambulance. He was bleeding from his mouth. ‘Course an ambulance had to come from Peterborough, so by the time they got him in, he had brain damage. I suppose if somebody would have gotten to him right away and given him oxygen, he may have been alright. But after that he was in the Concord state hospital. We used to call it ‘the nuthouse. ‘
After my grandfather was hospitalized, they brought him down to New Ipswich for Thanksgiving once and he took off. He wanted to go home. And they finally found him back at the farm. And my father said, “That’s it.” And my Uncle Harvey and my father brought him back to Concord and told him, “You’re not coming home anymore.” And then he just died after that.
He once tried to jump out from his bedroom window, which was upstairs in our house. And so my parents were scared that he was going to hurt himself or burn the place down or something. He must have been in his 80s when he died. But the shape that guy was in, he would have lived to be over 100 if not for the accident. He was wiry and scrawny and tough as nails.
Ralph's story sounds familiar. We did loose hay with a similar set up. Also picked blueberries. Cut off the upper beeks of chickens so they wouldn't peck the eggs. Ollie and I would be on the hay wagon tamping the hay down. Our grandfather used his homemade tractor to pull the hay fork via a pulley system. He did raw milk. He only had 8 cows. Lanthier was our milkman. Our milk came in bottles with cream at the top.