Living and Farming in Pike County

About the Book

Ralph Thomas Kern was born less than a year after the end of World War I. His father, Karl, a U. S. Navy aircraft machinist, married his hometown sweetheart, Pearl Thomas, right after Armistice Day. They returned to Pittsfield, IL a few months before Ralph’s birth in September 1919. A trade-school-trained auto mechanic, Karl opened and operated Kern’s Garage in Pittsfield until succumbing to his deep urge to return to farming, in part as a preferred place to bring up, by then, three sons and a daughter. Ralph, the eldest son stayed close to farming in Pike County for the rest of his years.

The young family felt the great depression firsthand and intimately as the crash of stock market, the economy, and agriculture drained away two-thirds of the value of the farm and dairy cows purchased and mortgaged two years earlier. Ralph was coming onto eight years old when the family moved to the farm three miles from Pittsfield. He was old enough to know the stresses of those times and, years later, to be part of his father’s emergence to economic success. Ralph’s essays encapsulate the joys of being a boy in the free and open air of a farm neighborhood: fishing, swimming, skating, hoop-rolling, corn-cob battles, going to State Fair, and a baseball doubleheader in St. Louis in 1935. He rounds out the picture with the deprivations (not recognized until later) of living under depressed prices and a massive farm mortgage doing the work of a farm hand on weekends and vacations with horses and by mid-1930s a reliable tractor. He even discloses that when he was only eight his mother, once out of Karl’s sight, regularly stopped the car and installed him as chauffeur for trips to town in the old Maxwell—a decade before drivers had to be licensed.

Ralph and Laverne, his wife of more than 60 years, met in grade school. Ralph offers accounts of different aspects of schooling in their traditional one-room country school: learning, playing, boy-girl alliances, bullies, keeping track of bluebird nests on the 2½-mile walk to and from the Red Brick School house, box suppers, and school programs. He was the middle of three Kern family generations whose members attended Prairie School during its life from before 1890 to closing in 1956, when Ralph’s son Fred was a student there.

After two years in agriculture college at the University of Illinois, Ralph came home to marry Laverne and to take up farming. In little more than 20 years, they moved from farming jointly with Karl through good and tight times to become, on his own, one of the earliest producers of 200-bushel corn and manager a hog-breeding and feeding program that annually produced up to 3,500 200-pound-plus open-range market hogs in 5½ months with the best profit margin within his cooperative farm-record association. Ralph’s essays personalizes the good and the difficult times, his lifelong love affair with farm machines, especially International Farmall H and M and corn pickers and combines. And he recounts some of the drudgery as well as joy he found in farming.

When Ralph and Laverne’s one son, Robert Fred (named for his two uncles), opted for a career in music education, they closed out their direct involvement in farming. Thus Ralph was the fourth, and last generation of the Kern family to farm in the community southeast of Pittsfield: Great Grandfather Frederick, Grandpa Fred, Karl, and Ralph. Ralph’s two brothers went other directions: Fred into geology and school-teaching, and Bob was a college professor and later a world-traveled consultant in agricultural and environmental communication.

Ralph became a feed company salesman, which expanded his knowledge of both the people and the geography of Pike County, especially the hill country in the southern part. There he met intriguing characters from whose junk piles he began to indulge his long fascination with antiques: muzzle-loader rifles, iron implement seats and tool boxes, old-time corn equipment fro

About the Author

At age 8, Ralph Thomas Kern moved from Pittsfield, IL to a small farm outside of town, just ahead of the Great Depression. While in the one-room Prairie School, Ralph met Laverne, with whom his life has since been entwined—including 60 years of marriage and one son (a music educator). Ralph’s farming career began just before World War II. On four farms in 25 years, he proved his mettle with high-yield crops (one of the first farmers in his area to grow 200-bushel corn) and efficient hog farming. Leaving farming in mid-1960s, Ralph’s work remained in farming—a salesman for feeds and grain bins, and later as a seasonal salesman of seeds. Interests in hunting, fishing, and antiquing co-existed with his work and expanded in retirement. His friendliness attracted dozens of friends throughout the Midwest and as far away as British Columbia.