Christmas on the Farm

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When I was a youngster growing up in northern Idaho, my Albertson grandparents managed the Bonner County Farm. Around Sandpoint, which is the county seat, it was known simply as “the county farm,” a massive, 25-room brick farmhouse that rose like a fortress from the pasture land that surrounded it.

The farm was home to about 40 old men who had no place to live and no one to care for them. Back then, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were no federal or state programs that funded care facilities for the homeless.

Baltzer Hunt built the original two-story home for his family, using bricks from a foundry he owned on the southern edge of the property. He was rumored to have lost the home and acreage to Bonner County for unpaid property taxes in 1916.

The county first considered converting the home into a hospital but later decided its highest and best use was as as a "Poor Farm" - a home and farming operation for the downtrodden and destitute. Using bricks from the foundry, Bonner County turned the Hunt family home into the imposing 25-room house that I remember from my boyhood.

My grandparents ran the "the Poor Farm" and its livestock, haying and gardening operations from 1940 until they moved back to their ranch on Pack River in 1957.

Mr. Hunt's business must have prospered in its early years. His bricks were used in many buildings in early day Sandpoint. The brick and mortar is still visible in numerous exposed walls supported by interior timber and steel superstructures

The old farmhouse was abandoned in the early 1960s and most of its brick walls tumbled into a flooded basement. I recovered a bright red brick from the rubble years ago. It is now a beautiful bookend in our office library.

I was too young in the Forties and Fifties to appreciate the "Poor Farm’s" social significance, but now that I am older and see what is going on in our country I am haunted by the nameless faces of our nation’s homeless, especially during the Christmas season.

There was a story in the Oregonian a couple of Sundays ago about teenagers younger than my own who were living in the streets of Portland, eating out of garbage bins and hustling pocket change on street corners.

Not far from their Pioneer Square hangout, old men like the old men of my childhood stand silently in long early morning lines, waiting for a hot meal. For most, it was as close to home as they would ever get.

Our careers and our busy lives have made it too easy for us to dismiss the emptiness that fills these lives of despair lived out of sight, out of mind. But these images of our national disgrace have become a source of great discomfort for me because I have never gone to bed cold, hungry or unloved.

And so the question that asks a million questions but offers no answers: What can we do - if anything - to bring our nation’s homeless home again?

I believe my grandparents succeeded where our society is failing because they provided something money cannot buy. Love - the milk of human kindness. There doesn’t seem to be enough of it to go around anymore.

Most of us assume someone else is doing the reaching out that we would do ourselves if only we could overcome our own uneasiness with our comfort and their discomfort. If only we had the time. If only. 

"If only" was never a problem for my grandparents because they never forgot the hunger and loneliness of their own childhoods.

My grandmother scrubbed floors on her hands and knees in Montana's state orphanage in Twin Bridges. She landed there after typhoid fever killed her parents when she was seven. Out of the kindness of his heart, a wealthy man she never met paid her room and board. Her four-year-old brother was sent somewhere else. It took her 50 years to find him.

My grandfather remembered that he and his three siblings almost starved to death in the bitter cold near Olds, Alberta in January 1900. His restless father, Hans Carl Albertson, a Dane by birth, saddled his horse and rode west from Jefferson City, Missouri to Leadville, Colorado after the Civil War. He packed up his family and moved to Olds chasing dreams of riches that never panned out.

Sixty-eight Christmases have come and gone since our last Christmas together on the farm. I miss my old friends – all of them gone now:

Jim Reed, who let me help him gather eggs from the chicken house, and who read to me before I could read by myself. He had been a Great Northern conductor and always wore pin-stripped bib overalls.

Delbert Wendt, who was forever a boy, and who cared for a mean-as-hell whiteface bull he named Dallas. He had fallen out of a hayloft when he was 10. Dallas followed him around like a faithful old dog.

Charlie Westergard, a gentle man with a big heart who could fix anything. He kept his tools in cardboard boxes under his bed.

Bespeckled Charlie Steele, who taught me how to skip rocks on a nearby pond. Most days he walked to town by himself for reasons known only to him. He never learned to tell time but my grandfather taught him how to read four o'clock on the hands of his pocketwatch so that he could be home by suppertime.

Wheelchair-bound Ernie Betton, a Dutchman who weeded my grandmother’s three-acre garden on his hands and knees, and whose laughter and broad smile always drew your eyes away from his arthritically disfigured hands and feet.

Mr. Wespe, an imposing Swiss watchmaker who one Christmas crafted a beautiful crayon box for me from apple wood gathered from a a small orchard behind the farmhouse. He etched "Jimmy" in gold leaf on the hinged lid. His jewelers mark and repair dates are also etched on the inside backs of both of my grandfather's pocketwatches - Christmas gifts from my grandmother in 1962.

Bill Hodges, a war weary logger who stood erect with his massive right hand over his heart whenever the Star Spangled Banner was played on television. He had survived the 47-day Meuse-Argonne Offensive in November 1918. Some 26,000 Americans died in what was then the deadliest battle in American history. When Bill stood, the TV room always fell silent out of respect for him.

Smitty, a leathery old Indian who loved to whittle. He knew that I loved to play Cowboys and Indians, so he carved a bow and arrow set for me. "Always be an Indian," he said with a quiet smile. "Always."

Smitty, Hodges and all of the others who shared the warmth of the home my grandparents made for them also made my young life much richer.

I miss those bygone Christmas mornings when my grandfather and I would go from room to room handing out wrapped gifts. It never occurred to me that someone had to pay for them.

Years later, I learned that my grandfather had worked out an elaborate bartering scheme involving local merchants and charities and sides of beef and pork that he traded for trousers, gloves, hats, shirts, socks,scarfs and coats that kept North Idaho's icy winter cold at bay. Simple but useful gifts from the heart.

After the presents were opened, we all gathered around an old pump organ in the poker room to sing Christmas songs. A blue-haired organist from one of the local churches kept us on key, more or less. We had hymnals, but I’m pretty sure not a soul in the room could read music, except maybe the organist.

There was the customary bottle of Christmas cheer for toasting the memories of those who had gone on to a better world. Then we would retreat to the dining room for one of my grandmother’s spectacular Christmas turkey dinners – cooked over a wood stove so large that it held three fire boxes and two massive ovens.

After dinner, my grandparents served apple pie and ice cream. Then came stories of unrequited hopes and dreams, told by old loggers, miners and railroaders who had worked their way west, transforming our nation into the greatest industrial power in the history of civilization. I had such admiration for them – these young men grown old. They were my heroes, and in many ways, they still are.

On Christmas morning, stop for a moment and count the blessings that fill your life, however small they may seem. And when you sit down to Christmas dinner amid the warmth of family and friends, take a moment to remember the homeless and destitute who live among us. They, too, have their stories.

I also hope that in this Season of Giving you will give something of yourself to your favorite charity. It is what Christmas is really all about – and it is what I remember most fondly about Christmas Morning on the Farm.