Sundays with Ernie

By ART CULLEN

My father-in-law Ernie Gales could defy death only so many times before it caught up with him.

There was the time we were in the house on the farm between Lu Verne and St. Joe when we heard a loud thud outside. Ernie and his hired man, Clete Salz, had jacked up a combine head in the shed. Ernie had just crawled out from beneath it when it crashed. We rushed outside and found Ernie and Clete, hands on hips, in a cloud of dust thinking what to do next.

Then there was the crash just a few years back near Ventura that nearly took Ernie’s head off. He didn’t like the extraction plan the EMTs had devised, so he instructed them on how to remove him from the wreckage. They listened, he lived to complain that he had just filled ’er up with gas.

More recently, Ernie donned the rare pair of new overalls to trim some branches when the chainsaw slipped and tore into his leg. He credited the striped Key denim with minimizing the injuries — but they were brand new.

Five weeks ago, COVID came to call. Pneumonia set in. Ernie had to go into the Algona nursing home, where he had many friends at age 93. So many thought he would make it home to see another harvest. He hankered for it, but the toll was too great and he died Oct. 25.

“Your muse is gone,” remarked Carol Gales, wife Dolores’s sister.

I spent many Sunday afternoons interviewing one of the smartest farmers you could ever know. He was a voracious reader with a high school diploma, a student of history with the mind of an engineer who could disassemble a machine or economic system and reconstruct it.

He would hold forth on the inherent drain that transportation, distribution and energy systems impose on whole-farm prosperity, ending with the declaration that “You got everything you need right here.” If you understand the land, you can determine your destiny — a lesson lost on so many.

He viewed the world with a video camera on top of a grain bin, a Riverdale Township perspective right there in St. Joe along the Des Moines River, the center of his universe just a hop and a skip from the steepled church that has been retired all but for funerals.

A huge crowd was there — where do all these people come from? — streaming through for the wake three hours or more Friday, and packed into the St. Joe gym for beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, and green beans catered in from West Bend on Saturday. You will never be sent off hungry from St. Joe.

Bill Farnham appeared, lost without his muse. Bill is the Algona historian, a stock broker who is growing his hair long late in life. “I’ve made a lot of money, but whoo boy have I lost a lot,” Bill said. He buys farmland little chunks at a time. He calls himself a “desk farmer.” Ernie taught him. Bill works 700 acres from his desk. They encouraged each other’s conservation efforts. When he listened to Ernie, Bill surely made money. An odd couple.

The Capesius boys, Ernie’s nephews, farmed his ground and looked after him. He was welcome at their Pioneer Seed shed in Algona, where customers could receive a brief genealogy if they were from southern Kossuth County, sort of a customer bonus. They pulled him out when he got stuck mowing the government ground — twice in one day.

Donnie Wagner recalled how Ernie kept the job going by building a wooden bearing. Son Charlie Gales told about how Ernie kept them running at midnight combining with a greasy rag stuck in a hot bearing to get the last few rows in — when the boys just wanted to bag it all. Somehow it worked. He understood how things operated: the sun, corn shellers, the Chicago Board of Trade, debt.

“Capital will scour the globe looking for a slave,” he said.

Make do with what is at hand. You get what you got. He worked it. He did not seek to acquire, but he managed to conserve and foster. He helped neighbors hold together during the Farm Crisis. He persevered, austere but generous, by making what you have work for you.

I learned a lot. He was skeptical of a son-in-law as he was of almost everything. “Sounds pretty risky,” he would say. He was loyal and supportive. He could make me bite my lip, and occasionally let loose my Irish, which could elicit a chuckle from his wife, Helen. She died seven years ago. Ernie was lonely without Helen. He made do. Dolores and her siblings were troopers in his final years. I was negligent, but I rationalize that Ernie understood that I was filled with inertia and dread over the demise of who I considered to be among the last truly independent men standing in a world that raced from work horses named Daisy to self-guided tractors.

The mind of a genius often features eccentricities. Ernie was concerned about someone falling down the basement stairs in his house. Rather than simply shut the door, which might affect the delicate balance of ventilation, he dug seat belts out of a junk car in the grove and had son-in-law Mark Gaertner rig them up across the stairwell. To get through, you release the buckle. Why doesn’t everybody think of that?

Because there was only one Ernie “Junior” Gales.

Art Cullen is editor of The Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2022

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