Introduction
I grew up as a Midwestern farmer. My mother and father gave me a rich Christian heritage. Our lives were centered around the local church. There were six boys and we all had a sister. The seven children slept on the floor as much as in the bed to make room for the visiting missionaries, evangelists, and others who came to our church and home.
I had the advantage during the early years of living in one of those few remaining pockets where the Rural Electric Administration had not yet penetrated. We had no electricity, no telephone, nor television.
I filled the reservoir on the Home Comfort cook stove, carried wood to fill the wood box, filled the glass jar on the summer cook stove with kerosene, turned the sign in the window for the ice man, and wished with the Sears catalog.
My father had an eighth grade education; but it seemed to me he had a graduate degree in common sense as the entire community looked to him for wisdom and direction. He and my mother made tremendous sacrifices to see each of the seven children through a college and some through graduate school.
I still marvel at how my father has kept up with the times. He wrote a book entitled THINGS I NEVER FORGOT. My boyhood memories seem to always focus back to a vision of my father in the early morning hours before the farm chores, studying his SCOFIELD REFERENCE BIBLE, his Sunday school quarterly, and RIGHTLY DIVIDING THE WORD OF TRUTH—the extent of his library at the time. I can hear my mother and father praying for me as they knelt by the bedside.
Dad was a "lay preacher." He lived Christ in the community. He won others through friendship evangelism—the saloon keeper's daughter in the Sunday school class, the farmer kneeling at the tongue of his rake in the hay field, and the village blacksmith, to name a few. He stopped the farm machinery when necessary to help build the church building. We often spent Sunday afternoons in the neighboring town holding Sunday school and church services.
My favorite writer and literature for some time was John Turnipseed in the PRAIRIE FARMER. He had an appreciation for the man at the university; yet he did not want that sophistication to let him lose sight of the values of the barnyard, berry patch, and old Bessie.
The day came for my brother, Jerry (now Dr. Gerald R. Miller, retired from a lifetime of service at the University of Minnesota College of Agriculture) to go to the university and study agriculture. I often drove him there after one of his stays at home. I struggled with the question of why one who wanted to be a farmer needed to go to the university. Could that be practical?
I sensed some answer to this dilemma when I saw the test plots and the barns at the university. Then, I decided he had made the successful marriage of the theoretical with the practical when he began research to control our farm nuisance—Johnson grass.
Jerry came home from the university for one of his visits to put into practice one of his new university theories. It was time to prepare for Sunday dinner. He announced that he had learned a simpler way to kill a chicken.
The choice hen was selected from the chicken house. My brother asked one of us to get one of mom's hat pins. The pin was to penetrate a certain point in the chicken's brain and end its life without all of the gruesome sights of my grandmother's wringing the neck or our axe on the end of the fence post.