Ionia-Eaton-Barry County MI Archives News.....AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN LICH SR. October 1982 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/mi/mifiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: LaVonne I. Bennett lib@reliableinter.net April 29, 2008, 4:53 pm THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR, Bulletin Of The Sebewa Association; Volume 18, October 1982, Number 2. Submitted With Written Permission Of Grayden D. Slowins, Editor: October 1982 AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN LICH SR. My grandfather was John Lich I from Lansing, Illinois. He was an onion set farmer. My maternal grandfather was Henry Dorn. He was a plasterer by trade but he lived on a truck farm when he first came from Holland. Next year my wife and I and three couples, friends, are going to go to Holland in June to visit the place of origin. One of the men was born and raised there. He grows plants and he plans to take us all around Holland. I really look forward to that trip. I like to have somebody along who knows the place. My mother’s name was Sadie and my dad’s name was Peter. My parents had three children. I was the oldest, Henry was two years younger, and our brother, Peter, died when he was five years old. I was born in 1915 in Chicago at 63rd and Crawthers, where the folks lived at that time, adjacent to the Midway Airport in the clearing section of Chicago. My dad had a produce store in the Chicago market. He sold to the grocery stores. The grocers would come to the market early and buy their vegetables from a produce man. He would stay all night at the market while the farmers were bringing their produce in. He and others were called scalpers because they would buy from the farmer who wanted to get back to working on another crop. The scalpers would then sell to the storekeepers at an hour more convenient to them. When I was seven years old, as I remember, I sat on the thousand bags of sweet corn. The ears were bagged, 5 dozen to a sugar sack. Farmers could not afford to stay at the market for a long time to wait for the top price so they would sell to a fellow like my dad. The store keepers depended on him. When the melons were ready in Indiana we would send trucks to get them. We would try to get tomatoes from as far south as Indianapolis to have them before the local crop. From that age on I was always with my dad on the market. We did everything in cash. I can remember walking around with a roll of bills as they say, “you could choke a hog with”. My dad was very good in figuring. Charles Dawes, who was later Vice President of United States, had pneumonia and tuberculosis. He was at Houghton Lake, Michigan. A man by the name of Anderson, a big plastering contractor, owned a big ranch at Houghton Lake and was a personal friend of Charles Dawes. He had a special open air house there where Dawes was sent for the treatment that was popular then. Mr. Anderson taught my dad arithmetic. He was fantastic at arithmetic. You could give my dad a string of figures and when you were through he would give you the addition or subtraction. He taught a little bit of that to me. You would take the round figures and then take the odd ones along with it and you could work it out pretty well. My folks were at that ranch for two years. My mother did the cooking. It was there that my brother, Henry, was born. I was two years old and, of course, do not remember. In Chicago my Grandfather Lich had four children and Grandfather Dorn had ten children. They had rough going when they came to Holland. My dad grew up with a group of guys around the stockyards. When he married my mother he was drinking a little too much to suit Grandpa Dorn. Grandpa got hold of Mr. Anderson, the plastering contractor, and asked him if he had a place for his son-in-law. He needed a foreman on the ranch at Houghton Lake. Pa took the job and got straightened out all right. When we went back to Chicago he got into the produce business. I went to high school in Chicago. I went only two years because it was right through the depression. I had a chance to get a job then with a fellow by the name of Sam Muscaralla, an Italian guy. He had a route for delivery to stores all over the South Side. We knew him at the market. He wanted to know if I would drive truck for him, so I quit high school. At that time the banks were closing. My mother was at a Ladies Aid meeting and heard that the Bain Banks of Chicago-- -a big group of banks, were having problems. My folks had some money, a nice new house in Chicago, I had $700 and my brother had $400. I remember sitting around the table when my folks said maybe if we boys did not mind, we could take that money out and make a payment on the house. Mama went there that morning and drew that money out and at noon the bank closed. That was quite a deal. Shortly after that Nell and I got married. I worked for Sam Muscaralla. My dad had begun to have ulcers and quit the market. He was elected Chief of Police at Evergreen Park. He held that position through four administrations for fourteen years. He did a good job at that. One time there was a truck for Arthur Dixon Transfer Co., a big cartage company in Chicago, that came through Evergreen Park with an overload. That was in 1934. Pa pinched them. They sent out a foreman to see if they could fix the ticket and get the thing straightened out. Pa said there was no fixing the ticket. They just had to get their trucks within the legal limit. After they talked and visited, the guy asked if there was anybody there that would need a job. The Arthur Dixon Transfer Company had the complete cartage contract for the World’s Fair. They moved everything into the Fair and they moved everything out of the Fair---all the foreign villages went in there through Dixon. A man by the name of Hibbard had that contract and he worked for Arthur Dixon. Even every ice cream cone went through there. All the parts for Ford Motor Company and Chevrolet (they made cars there at the fair) all went through Dixon. At that time they had 400 teamsters who would haul freight from every railroad. C. B. & Q., the I. C., Northwestern, Burlington---railroads from everywhere. Dixon was a transfer company for freight. Frank Gary came out and talked to Pa. Next day Pa asked if I wanted a job with Arthur Dixon. He told Pa I would not get pushed around and I could go down there and get a job. I went there at age 18 and he put me on the job right off the bat. There were men there who had worked 35 years. Often they would sit on the sidelines while I would get work. We had no union at that time. Because I had a drag, I got a job. He gave me a truck with five helpers and I hauled rolls of paper from the team truck right underneath the Wrigley Tower where we would take it across the river over to Popular Mechanics Magazine. It was the heavy paper that made the covers for the magazines. We had five cars to empty a day. I had a great big Packard, solid-tired truck. We would unload that---of course I was a pretty decent ball player and when the printers started having their dinners from eleven o’clock to two o’clock and played ball on their free time, I was in on the games. I had what they called a steady house job, a prime job paying $54.50 per week and that was a lot of money for those days. Two years later in August Nell and I got married and I still had this steady house job. In the meantime the union came in. There was a racketeer union, 705, in Chicago. I have a withdrawal card from them I got when I moved to Michigan. I voted for the union then. Frank Galvin was the head of the union. He was shot and killed right on the steps of our building by a rival union. They assessed us five bucks for flowers for him. The first of December the union went into effect and with it the seniority lists applied. All that my seniority would get me then was three half days a week. I would go down in the morning and there was nothing to do. We would stay around until noon and then there were some tractor-semis that would pull out. Three half days for the whole month of December was all I had. There was no more favoritism with guys who had a drag like I had had. Then I realized I could bump in on a city truck and go with a tractor and semi- trailer from different railroads with trailer loads of stuff to another. They would load trucks at night with stuff coming into Chicago to be delivered to different stores. I got a south run with a pretty good sized Ford truck. I would deliver goods to various stores all the way out to 135th St. or 140th St. south and then I’d call back to the dispatcher and he would give me a few pickups back into the city. That job paid $34.50 but that was better than three half days a week. Pa and I had heard that there was a man in Alto, Michigan who had quite a group of men raising onions and we needed onions. My dad and I came out here and found Floyd Hunt in 1934. We wanted only the small onions. There was a poor onion crop here with a lot of small onions they could not sell. We wanted them for onion sets. There were very few onion sets in Chicago. Onions less than 11/16th were called over runs. I stayed with Floyd and Jane in Alto. We rented a store on Main Street where we hired a group of people to screen the onions we bought from the farmers. All the onions over an inch and one eighth we put in 10# bags and took them to a warehouse in Chicago where they were sold to the onion set people, who mixed them with onion sets and that made them a crop to sell. That is how I got interested in this Michigan country. I still remember going with Floyd south of Sunfield down where Bert Creitz lived because he raised onions. His dad-in-law, Clarence Downing, had developed one of the best strains of onion seed available and that Downing strain is used yet. Just off Sunfield Highway where you hit M-50 and turn to your left and up a hill there was an old man who raised some onions in a couple of pockets of muck. They called him “Shifty-eyed Lumbert”. His eyes would shift back and forth all the time. I’ll never forget that because it impressed me so much. One of the things that brought me here to Sebewa was that at that time I lived here with Floyd when we went all around buying onions and when we would come at a farm at 11 o’clock in the morning to buy some onions and we would be talking about the onions, the lady of the house would start making dinner and we had to stay for dinner. I had never realized that kind of hospitality and friendship. In Chicago you did not know the people who lived two doors away from you. That friendliness really struck me. There was a man over near Hastings by the name of Kaiser who had a hundred and some acres of asparagus. He was selling it to a canning company in South Haven. They cut him down to a cent and a half a pound. He had his neighbors raising asparagus also. At that price they could not make anything of their crop. I was then a 17-year-old kid. He came to Alto and asked me if I knew of a market for that asparagus. I knew a beautiful market for it with Libby, McNeil & Libby, a big canning company in Chicago. My dad came out to get a load of onions and I was all excited about that asparagus crop. I felt that we could make a nice living and we could pay those guys 2 ½ or 3 cents a pound and they could make a living and we could get 5 or 6 cents a pound for it in Chicago. My dad said “Kid, you know nothing about that. We’d have to have refrigeration trucks and other equipment”. To my protest that we could buy it, it was, “No”. He couldn’t stand it. One week end I went home and went to Libby, McNeil and Libby, saw the purchasing agent on the seventh floor, told him my story and said I could get the “grass” if you will buy it. He said, “I’ll take every bit of that you can bring here and I’ll give you a contract for 5 ½ cents a pound.” I came back and my dad would not listen to me. He could not see getting into that. I always had that in the back of my mind. It was then I went to work for Sam Muscaralla and soon after that for Dixon. The Dixon firm did not work on holidays. So, on a Washington’s birthday we planned a visit to the Hunts. I had not seen Floyd, Jane, Bud and their two daughters for some time. I was then married. I had written Hunts a couple of times. The holiday happened to fall on a Friday and we were off until Monday. On Thursday Nell and I drove out to Alto. They were glad to see us. On a drive around the country I asked Floyd about the asparagus. We drive over to Kaiser’s. There was some 20 acres of asparagus left. The rest had all gone back. He was then selling to a place in Fennville and getting a fairly decent price for it. In our ride around I said, “Boy, I sure wish I could farm”. Floyd said, “You mean that?” I said, “I sure do, I would love to farm.” He asked if I had any money and I had to reply I had none. I was working but we lived the check. We stayed there that week end. Floyd said he would see what he could think of. On March 15 he wrote me a letter to the effect that the Depositors Corporation, headed by Erm Garlinger, had foreclosed on a lot of the farms around here and they had what was called the Wallace farm on the Clarksville Road next to Corey VanDeBurg. Floyd owned the muck land across the road, now owned by DeBruyns. He owned the 40 acres there and the “Rattle Snake Forty” back of that, back of Patrick’s. Erm Garlinger had told Floyd that the Depositors Corporation wanted to liquidate some of their holdings they had out here. He told Erm that he had a young man in Chicago who wanted a piece of muck. There was a long 40 and a square forty where Ken and Evelyn David now live. Floyd wrote saying he could buy me a piece of muck right across from his forty for $1500 for the 80 acres. It had a spring on the ditch there with a tile where you could get water. There was an orchard, a well and a basement on the top of the hill a little further south from David’s house. The old Wallace farm had been abandoned as a dwelling and the “Swamp Angels” used to play cards in the old house until they got wild one night and burned the place down. On March 20 my dad and I and Nell and her mother came to Sebewa to look at that place. I was all excited. I was going to build a garage-house on that foundation and try to farm the muck. My dad said, “I don’t see how you can do this”. It was spitting rain and snow and my mother-in- law was crying. We walked back through the humps where the ditch had been cleaned out; went up there and got them a drink from the spring; they thought I was crazy, I guess. I said to Floyd, “I’ll buy it.” He said “How much have you got”. I said I could raise a couple of hundred dollars. Would you believe this? He had a little farm in Clarksville next to Timson’s Orchard southwest of Clarksville. He went to the bank and put a mortgage on that 80 acres of ground and went to the Depositors Corporation and bought this forty acres and then turned around and sold it to me for $100 down and a hundred dollars a year until I paid for it. Floyd was more than a father to me. He taught me everything I know about farming. I knew about selling crops but nothing about raising them. We drove down the hill and headed for Harry and Letha Patterson’s store. Standing on the steps there was Carl Creighton, a boy twelve or thirteen years old. I went up to him and told him who I was and that we had just bought the Wallace farm. He said, “I’m your neighbor next door”. I asked him if he knew if there was any place around here to rent. He pointed across the fields and said that George Coe and his wife had just died. Their place was next to Ralph Coe and maybe if I would talk to Ralph I could find out about the place. We introduced ourselves to Ralph and had a nice little talk and I told him what I wanted. He said, “I’ll show you the place.” All the furniture was in there though the place had not yet been hooked up to electricity. He told me to go see Rex Karcher, who was administrator for the place. We went to see Rex and meantime Ralph had called Rex and told him to rent the place to me. On the way over to Rex’s my dad had said that if we could rent the place for $30 a month it would be better than trying to build something on the old Wallace foundation while we were getting the crops in. Finally I asked Rex how much rent he would have to have. He asked, “Is three dollars a month too much?” I agreed to wire the house for $15 and that made me 5 months rent in advance. Nell was pregnant with Johnny. We moved in the house. I worked for Floyd for a dollar an hour and when I used his equipment on my land he charged me a dollar an hour for that. Floyd also had the eighty acres of muck on Henderson Road. The next year I filled the George Coe barn with onions and then moved them over to Tannis’ Storage at Clarksville. One day, Floyd, acting very much the father to me said, “You ought to have a hog”. He took me over to John Long’s west of Clarksville where we bought a Duroc sow with five pigs, one for me and one for Bud---$25 apience. Bud had six pigs and I had five pigs. I helped Ralph Coe and Allen Cross and with what we could scrounge and with scraps from the table, I raised that hog. At Christmas time we butchered those hogs---one for us and one I took to my mother-in-law in Chicago. One day Issi Fletcher came over. John Sargeant had lost his place to Issi Fletcher. John had bought 20 acres across the road and couldn’t pay for it and just turned it over to Issi. Issi asked how about me buying that land. I said O.K. what is the price. He wanted $1800 for that forty acres. So I bought that for $100 down and $100 a year until it was paid. Mrs. Henderleiter was at Grandma Coe’s. She had a 40 acres on the back of the Sargeant 40. Grandma Coe remembered a house back there on a knoll and she used to carry butter from a well back there when she was a girl. She talked to Kitty Henderleiter on the phone and told her about us as her neighbors. Kitty wanted to sell her 40 to us. I went to see her and bought that from her for $1200. Then we lived in the Sargeant house. The George Coe house was rented for a couple of years and then I bought that forty from Mark Westbrook. That made me 120 acres on Henderson Raod and the 80 on the Clarksville Road. Those two pieces joined on the corner of Floyd’s 80. We arranged a legal right-of-way at that junction. We moved here April 15, 1940. My uncle, Oliver Dorn, who was a truck gardener, moved us with his nice new truck. I said to him “if I just had your truck.” I knew where I could buy onions; Corey VanDeBurg was raising spinach and I could sell these things in Chicago. Uncle Oliver said, “John, you’ve just got to slow down a little bit. Just look at me. I’m 60 years old and I just got this truck”. I never forgot that. I was full of steam and raring to go and here was Uncle Ollie, who had worked and waited until he was 60 years old to get such a truck. During war times here, labor was short. I organized a group of ladies---Wilma Coe, Irene Hunt, Grace Bailiff, Dorothy Meyers---they all worked for me for a number of years helping harvest our celery and onions. One day I walked over to Fred Sindlinger’s---I had been working a few fields of his place, Clyde Avery worked a couple of fields and Dale Shetterly worked a couple of fields. I said, “Fred, would you sell me your farm”. He was concerned as to where they would live. I explained that with a life lease they could continue to live there as they had. Two weeks later I saw Fred walking toward our house. He said they would like to go talk to attorney Douglas Welch about selling. We made a deal where I would keep up the outside of the house and I sunk a 21-foot well near the house. Nora had carried water from the spring always before. They agreed to sell the place at $100 an acre with four per cent interest. (To be continued.) File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/mi/ionia/newspapers/aninterv143gnw.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/mifiles/ File size: 20.5 Kb