"Dad couldn't get off the railroad until the 15th of June. They wouldn't let him go. So it was me. Thank goodness I was used to working the horses when I was only 12. My grandfather died suddenly when, oh, I must have been about 10. So I learned to harness the horses and to plow and do all kinds of things so that we could keep our little farm. I had an uncle that came home to help out. But we couldn't pay him, so he worked on the farms all around in busy time. That way, he would start me out plowing, for instance, before he went to work in the mornings. So, I was used to doing that. It was a good thing I was because we had a team of mules and a team of horses. So we had a four-horse hitch. That's what I said. The day my brother was born I listed [planted] corn. I said, 'I hope that corn knows what to do,' because I had never seen corn come up. I had just come [to Nebraska] in the fall when the corn crop was ready to harvest about, almost anyway. I said, 'I've never seen corn come up. I just hope it knows what it's doing because I don't. But I listed corn with the four-horse, four-hitch – that is, with a team of mules and a team of horses. It just happened that Dad bought a team of mules and a team of horses and they worked together. We either hooked them abreast or else we strung them out two and two, depending on what we were doing."