Chet
When we moved to the Farm, Chet Weigle was introduced to us as the Farm Manager, and it always seemed that he was Hod Bolesky's employee. Perhaps in the old days of the Learners (an era which was ending as we arrived) he had done a lot for the Farm, but when we got there, his role was very quickly diminishing. He lived with his wife and children in a house at the top of the hill, and his basement was the home of Woodville Taxidermy, which, along with teaching at Mansfield Christian School, was his source of income. For the first year or two I was on the Farm, the Weigles were part of the Farm Dinner rotation and got a share of the garden and meat production, but we never saw Chet or the kids at any of the church events. His wife Carol was much more part of things, though, and was good friends with the farm wives.
My first memory of an interaction with Chet is quite specific. My family was living in the big farmhouse at the far side of the meadow, beyond the ponds. One evening, just after dusk, a pickup truck filled with teenage boys carrying guns came roaring up our driveway and disappeared behind the barn. We had just moved from inner city St. Louis, so we weren't aware that rural Ohio thinks of this sort of thing as a typical summer evening event. I got my wife and kids to lay flat on the floor while I phoned the Farm Manager to find out what was going on. I got his wife, who calmly informed me that the driver of the truck was Chet, and he had simply gathered a few high school boys to go to the barn and shoot rats. Ordinary stuff. Lots of fun. I told her that the next time, I would simply phone the police.
Very quickly, Chet's work around the Farm diminished to almost nothing. One of us ignorant Farmies (I think it was Steve Griffith) pointed this out at a meeting, wondering why we were working to provide food for them, and Chet angrily answered that we'd think differently the next time we were snowed in. That was Chet's main job for quite a while: snow plowing (for which Hod bought him a new 4X4 truck).
Chet did have one other major job on the Farm. The pond at the intersection of Straub and Woodville was stocked with trout so Hod's friends could go fishing, and one of Chet's tasks (aside from arranging for the pond to keep getting restocked) was to feed the fish. Several of us remember his genius invention that was supposed to relieve him of the task. He shot several groundhogs, put the carcasses in a plastic milk crate, and suspended it from a tree, overhanging the water. The idea was that as the carcasses rotted, the maggots would fall into the water and feed the fish. It didn't work. Maggots tend to stay with the rotting flesh they are eating. The odor on a summer's day was intense, so there was a lot less trouble with people sneaking in for a midnight swim. Later a blue heron (a protected species) took up residence nearby and ate a lot of the fish. Chet and Hod didn't like that because the fish were expensive (and rainbow trout don't breed in a still lake), so the obvious answer was simply to shoot the bird.
Living near the Weigle family was entertaining, to say the least. Just a few random memories:
- Chet and the Mansfield Christian boys had sort of a contest going to see who could prank the other. The one we all remember was the trip wire Chet installed around his house that set off blank shotgun shells when the boys tried to sneak up on the place.
- Chet's two sons found some plumbing pipe in the barn and made a glider. The first test pilot was Jody, who was a very skinny 8-year-old, and he actually did fly a bit down the gentle hill behind the barn. So the older boy took the contraption up to the top of the barn and jumped. Much heavier boy. No flight.
- Then there was the time the older boy got the empty casing from a Navy flare, filled it with black powder, and set it off by banging it on the concrete step. The resulting explosion shook the Lodge and severely injured his hand. My wife got to drive him to the emergency room.
- The State of Ohio came up with a scheme by which state police would report any freshly road-killed deer to people like Chet, who would get the deer, butcher it, and distribute the meat to needy people. This meant several deer a day, and Chet was overwhelmed, so he needed a way to increase efficiency. One deer-skinning strategy that we all remember (to my children's horror) was to hang up the deer by its back legs, attach hooks and cables to the hide, attach the other end of the cables to the farm tractor, and simply back up. They usually did this at night, with floodlights, so we had a great view of it from our living room.
Hod
Hod Bolesky was the money behind the Farm, and in addition to buying the land itself, apparently paid most of the cost of putting up the Lodge, the Arena Barn, and two purpose-built houses (Ray's house and the house that the Hickenbotham family lived in for years*). The property also included two existing houses which were modified for Farm use. (I don't know whether he owned the Weigle house, but it seems likely.)
From the moment we arrived at the Farm until Hod finally deeded the land over to Grace Fellowship Church (which occurred somewhat after the church was formed), the whole landlord/tenant relationship was based on handshake agreements between Ray and Hod. So far as I know, nothing was ever in writing—certainly nothing in writing was ever communicated to those of us who lived on the Farm. That often made our situation feel awkward and unstable, but for a very long time, things just proceeded without a hitch.
Hod never charged the Farm anything, and he did buy a couple of cars for Ray and a pickup truck and tractor, but we never got any operating or repair funds from him. So far as I know, his requests were fairly simple too. That trout pond had to keep stocked, and the area behind it had to be available for his friends to practice target shooting. I don't know what they were using, but their guns made far more noise than ordinary pistols or rifles. One of their projects was training hunting dogs. The idea was to keep the dog by their side while shooting the gun so the noise would destroy the dog's hearing and the dog wouldn't startle when they were out in the field actually hunting something. Having a shooting range just outside my back door and small children in the house gave us the jitters.
Hod's other requirement was that the tennis courts had to be kept in good condition so he and his friends could occasionally play there. That was surprisingly difficult. The surface was some sort of specialized paint that had fiber in it, and of course parking cars on it would damage the finish. The paint itself was expensive and had to be applied every couple of years. Major problem for a cash-poor ministry.
After Grace Fellowship Church had been going for a while, Hod decided to divest himself of the property. Oddly, instead of giving the whole thing to the church, he split it up. A large part went to the church, but some went to Ray (including Ray's house), and two of the houses were sold (the house at the end of the meadow and the house on Woodville). We had been on the Farm, living in the Woodville house, for about four years at the time, and we had seen Hod perhaps half a dozen times (if that many). Suddenly one day, without advance warning, he walked into our home with prospective buyers. It was, after all, his house and he had a key, so why not just walk in?
Looking back
The one word that comes to mind as I think of those days is "insecurity." My family and I were on the Farm because we were providing printing services to the church and to the ARC, and that was the reason Ray wanted to keep us around, but we never made enough money to do more than survive. My relationship was a handshake with Ray and Ray's was a handshake with Hod, so there was never a feeling that we could put down roots. Mostly we hoped that Hod and Ray wouldn't get tired of us. Then, eventually, they did.
*Fun fact: Those two houses plus the Lodge were built by Stan Wilging, a local builder who put up many apartment buildings. Stan had one set of ideas: dark stained wood, rose brick, exposed ceiling beams, textured plaster, orange shag carpet, and staircases made from dimensional lumber. He like to leave a large exposed boulder in the front yard. He had one favorite plumbing supplier too. The result was that the Lodge, Ray's house, and the Hickenbotham house all looked about the same, and when I moved into one of his apartment buildings, it was like living in the Lodge.
For the whole time that we lived in the Woodville house, the basement apartment was occupied by various young men who were in some way or another connected to Christian college groups. But in spite of the fact that their living space was connected to ours by a staircase with no lock, we had no say in who stayed there. These young men shared our washing machine, which meant that they would walk into our house for this purpose at any time without even knocking. The washing machine was in a closet in my bedroom, so random men in their 20s would open my door without warning at any time. I was in elementary school at this time. The other part of the house that we were not permitted any control over was an L off of the ranch style rectangle. This contained two guest rooms (one of which was more of a library) and a large bathroom. We were allowed into these spaces, but could not turn these into bedrooms for our family’s use. They had to be kept empty at all times in preparation for the church guests. So when my father mentions housing insecurity, I also think of the terror of strangers walking into my bedroom or peering into the ground-level window before deciding whether to walk in. The guns and horror show dismemberments next door (not to mention the period when their younger son decided to make a wild raccoon his pet and it kept dragging entrails from the taxidermy out of their garbage and all over the road) were less frightening.
ReplyDeleteBut being suddenly kicked out of that house as an elementary school student was deeply traumatizing. For my whole living memory, I’d had free rein to roam the woods, play in the tiny apple orchard, explore the barn, usually alone. And then we were told to get out with no explanation. For years, I had both wistful dreams and nightmares about the place.