Barnes, KS

Summer 1935

Dad's salary was dropping from about $250 per month to perhaps $60 a month if they could raise the money - which they rarely could. It was right in the middle of the Dust Bowl Days and the Great Depression. No one, or rather very few, had any money.

I have no idea what Dad paid for Flossie, but she arrived soon after the move and became our primary source of milk, not to mention butter, cottage cheese, cream for coffee, whipped cream, ice cream, etc. Flossie was a dandy Jersey cow. Looked like a thoroughbred and gave milk in the traditional Jersey way: rich with cream. In a quart bottle of Flossie's milk, about half of it would rise to the top as cream! Quart bottles in those days looked something like bowling pins of these days.

Dad had arranged with one of the farmers on the edge of town to pasture Flossie with his cows. Dad and I, one or both of us, would go out to milk her early every morning and in the evening before sundown. Dad did most of that chore until we moved to Keats, then it became primarily my job through my high school years (graduated in 1940).

Flossie had one stub of a horn on the right side of her skull and you learned to stay out of the way when she'd swing her head around to the right. But she was docile and easy to milk. Recently I showed our grandson Will Cooksey how to squeeze the teat on a cow so you could get the milk out. Ask him. He'll show you how.

When we moved to Keats KS in October of 1938, Flossie went with us of course. The church members at Keats were nearly all farmers and they came with their trucks and trailers to move all our goods. It was quite a parade. We were moved and sleeping in our new beds on the night we moved. We would keep Flossie on Phil Schwab's farm, about a quarter of a mile from our parsonage, and we would help Phil milk his 12 or 15 cows in payment for his keeping Flossie for us. The situation worked out very well and we became attached to the entire Schwab family. They had as many kids as we did but they were somewhat younger. Phil was a staunch Seventh Day Adventist, and he never gave up trying to convert me to his religion.

The move in October was not usual for preachers in those days. The Methodist system worked this way. (1) Annual conference was scheduled for October so preachers could stay on their home property until after their crops were harvested (all parsonages had garden areas). (2) No preacher knew if or where he would be moved until conference time, and (3) then you had to move after Conference Sunday and be in place to preach at your new charge on the immediately following Sunday. The system really messed up the school year for us kids, and eventually they change the system from October to June as the Conference date.

I'm not sure just when we lost old Flossie. I think she must have survived the family move from Keats to Hoyt in 1943, but I'm relatively certain she had gone the way of all good beasts by the time the family moved to Riley KS.

Flossie will never be forgotten by those of us who were so wonderfully nourished by her good milk during our growing-up years.