Frank’s Place (Again)

     As the 19^th century turned into the 20^th century, a small settlement of Bohemians formed on the southern edge of a Norwegian community known as Walks Camp.  Suchanek, Twoya, and Horak are the names I remember. 

     When I was a kid, Willie Suchanek was still a neighbor.  In my earliest memory, he lived in a trailer house on the Pratt place just north of us.  He sold Farmers’ Union insurance.  I think the trailer house was a summer residence.  I think he owned and lived in an apartment house somewhere in Denver most of the time.  Later, he would buy a place in Windsor Gardens when it was new.  He would reside there for the rest of his life, when he wasn’t farming or selling insurance in our neighborhood. 

     On the corner of what is now Road 28 and Road P stood the Suchanek school.  During my life, that quarter section was owned by Roy Ratliff and now by Lee Andersen.  Homer Hill lived there for a time, but I believe he rented it, probably from the Ratliffs.

      I know the name Joe Twoya because he homesteaded the quarter where our family farm now exists.  We are the third owners, our father having bought the place from the Kollaths who replaced Joe.  Legend has it that the small one room shed that stands just west of the schoolhouse-turned shop in our farmyard was Joe’s homesteader shack.

     I am sure there were other Bohemian families in the community, for I remember stories of other “foreigners”, but I can’t recall names.  That brings me to the name Frank Horak.

      Frank was still alive when I was a kid.  I only was around him once.  He was a frail old man with white stringy hair hanging down from under his hat, over his ears and his shirt collar, sometimes over his forehead and face.  He sat in Willie Suchanek’s Dodge pickup, door open, slobbering and spitting tobacco juice into the stubble field.  We avoided the water jug he used.

      I only recall him saying two things during the day or two he came to Willie’s field where we were harvesting his wheat.  He asked us kids, in reference to the Massey-Harris combine Dad was driving, “Where’d ya git the bitch?”  His voice was pretty much a squeak.  I think we answered respectably, but we wanted to laugh, have laughed many times since then, at his phrasing.  That was improper language in those days, especially from an adult.

     The other thing I remember him squeaking out came as Dad was working on the Massey and a thunderstorm menaced us from the west.  “It’s gonna piss, Connie,” he said.  I’m pretty sure we laughed then, and since then, too. 

     “Haven’t heard that for a long time, Frank,” Dad replied, laughing a little himself.

     Whatever else I know about Frank is hearsay, gathered from Mom and Dad’s conversations.  Mom used to quote Frank, using his pronunciation when he voiced his opinion of the financial institution that held his mortgage:  “Federal Land Bank t’ieves.”  The Federal Land Bank foreclosed on him and forced him to move off his homestead

     Frank lived out the rest of his life in a small house in South Limon.  Willie Suchanek was his caretaker.  Willie’s mother was a Horak, Frank’s sister.  I think Willie must have provided Frank with housing and other necessities that the “old age pension”, as it was called then, didn’t provide.  When Frank died, Willie made the house his residence when he was in the territory.

     Dad used to tell the story of Frank, on his way to town, meeting neighbors returning from town.  He invited them to take a break at his place and help themselves to a cup of coffee, still on the stove apparently.  The pair stopped at Frank’s place conveniently located about thirty yards north of what is now Road 3N.  In Dad’s story the two neighbors opened Frank’s door, started to enter, stepped back, saying “Phew, Frank!”  They slammed the door and continued on their journey.  Apparently, Frank, a lifelong bachelor, was not a very good housekeeper.

       Another story came from Nate Einertson.  The Einertson place was a couple of miles west of Frank’s on Road 3N.  The only things marking that homestead now are a couple of trees a hundred yards or so south of the road.

     We were in what is now Oscar’s Bar and Grille after a Sunday dinner.  Nate was sitting with Ida and a bunch of widows.  He apparently got tired of the women chatter so he came over where I was sitting, waiting for Mom to finish her conversation with the ladies.  Somehow, our conversation turned to Frank.  Nate said he was born in Frank’s house. 

    That got my attention.  I asked about the details.  Nate said his parents, Alfred and Olga, were just married.  Alfred hired on to help Frank with the farm work, and part of the deal was room and board for the hired man.  Frank conveniently hired the new bride to cook and keep house.  They were still living there when it came time for Nate to enter the world.   He was born in Frank’s house.

    Some time after Nate was born, Alfred moved the family to a farm west of the Blakstad place.  As a result of that move, Ida Blakstad became literally Nate’s life’s mate.

     In my earliest memories, there were still a few buildings left on Frank’s place.  Before I was born, Dad bought Frank’s homestead (from Federal Land Bank, tax sale? I don‘t know), three quarters of section, which is today mostly our pasture.

     I remember an old barn on the north edge of Frank’s farmstead, north of the Lickdab creek.  There remains a row of eroded concrete to mark one edge of the barn.  I remember Dad using the barn as a loading and working corral.  I wasn’t old enough to go to school so I was on hand when the cattle were loaded onto a truck for a trip to Denver to market.  Harold Drier was the truck driver.  After loading the cattle, Harold helped Dad castrate the younger bull calves.  Being too young to be in the pen where the action was taking place, I wandered around outside the old barn till the job was done.

      The old barn collapsed after that.  Dad used some of the lumber from the old barn to fashion a new corral with a loading chute.  I thought the new corral with its vertical boards nailed to horizontal rails made a dandy stockade.       

      Two other buildings stood south of the Lickdab, a granary and Frank’s house.  I don’t remember exactly what happened to the old granary, but I think it got torn down about the same time and for the same reason as Frank’s house.

    The house sat on a basement with amazingly thick cement walls.  No house built on sand for Frank.  The cement basement is all that remains today. 

     I don’t remember too much about the house.  It was two story, about 25 feet square.  There were never any doors or windows in the house.  The wooden stoop had rotted away.  To get in, you had to hoist yourself up to the threshold until you could get a knee in.

      We once had a cow named Brownie.  She was a Brown Swiss.  Her feet had been frozen as a calf with the result that her hind hoofs grew fast and in abnormal shape.  She couldn’t walk very comfortably.  She always limped and clicked and snapped more than any normal cow when she walked.

     One time when she was in the pasture that contained Frank’s house, a hail storm came up.  It was pretty vicious.  At chore time, time to “go get the cows”, Brownie was nowhere to be found.  Finally, we looked in Frank’s house.  There she was.  The old cripple had made the leap up into the house all right enough.  We accused her of goldbricking all that time.  Getting her to make the leap out of the house was a challenge.

     There was a steep narrow-stepped staircase to the upstairs.  I remember going up there a few times.  With a little imagination, you could see yourself up there with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn with Injun Joe and the other bad guy down below.  In the story, Injun Joe is on his way upstairs to check things out when the staircase comes crashing down, dumping Injun Joe on the floor and perhaps saving the boys’ lives.  I think Frank’s staircase might have been a little Iffy.  Nobody ever fell through it, though.

     Frank left quite a few things, old clothes and such, when he abandoned the place.  We mostly threw stuff out or destroyed it.  I remember a can of green tea powder.  We thought it was probably strychnine or something. 

      Though we would go inside the house and upstairs, we never went into the basement.  The stairway to it was outside.  There was a door at the bottom of the stairs.  It was mostly closed.  I’m not sure we could have opened it if we had ever dared to try.  I’m not sure exactly what we expected, except one thing.  There might be snakes down there!  That was enough of a deterrent.

       One other significant feature of Frank’s place was a cottonwood tree that stood in a little dip in the terrain north of the house, just south of the Lickdab.  The cottonwood was dead, but it provided an otherwise rare commodity for us—a tree big enough to climb.  It lost that attribute as the wood rotted and the branches could no longer be trusted to support a climber’s weight. 

     The tree fell over in a windstorm.  Today, nothing remains to mark its existence.  Dad always said Frank salted the tree to kill it.  He didn’t want the Federal Land Bank “t’ieves” getting his tree.

     In the mid-fifties, Dad decided he needed to replace the old red barn.  The new barn would be built out of reclaimed lumber, much of it to come from Frank’s house and perhaps his old granary.  When the wheat was planted and the hay cut and stacked one Fall, Dad began tearing down Frank’s house. 

       Mom was giving piano lessons three or four days a week. Little Sister wasn’t old enough to be in school, so Dad was child care provider two or three days a week.  One day while accompanying Dad to the destruction site, Sister stepped on a nail sticking up through a board, necessitating a trip to Hugo for cleansing, dressing, and the obligatory tetanus shot.

     A second thing occurred that was both much more serious, and much less serious.  Dad was having some difficulty with some job and was muttering, carefully, realizing that little pitchers have big ears.  Apparently, Sister had heard enough of his muttering, and in the spirit of helpfulness, she said, “Why don’t you say ‘sonny bitch’ Daddy?  That’s what the boys do.”

      Of course, we laughed when we first heard the story, but then there was the serious side.  Using profanity was not tolerated, and we had been ratted out by our little sister!  We probably got a stern warning, though not stern enough that I remember it.

     Today, all that remains of Frank’s place are the concrete structures, the house’s basement, now filled with trashed tin cans and old wire and such, the granary floor, and a piece of the barn’s foundation.  An old well is covered with a car frame and wire to keep the cattle from falling into the it.  Looters have removed anything of value, things that we considered junk, such as the kitchen stove, and an old hand-cranked coffee grinder, being the only two things that come to mind.

      There is very little to remind a person of Frank’s existence, a problem for us mortals. Perhaps Shakespeare said it best.   

     

SONNET 65

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
   O, none, unless this miracle have might,
   That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

          

    May Frank live on, a pioneer, homesteader, and character, in the humble words of a little kid’s memory.