What do you want to be when you grow up?

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

At one time if someone had asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up, I might have answered, “almost everything.” I’ve always had many interests, and much of that has remained throughout my life.

The only thing is, if you are going to do something, you can’t do everything. That is the reality that constantly confronts someone like me.

Sometimes I am ready to espouse the theory that kids are naturally interested in many things, but their interests get snuffed out by their life circumstances along the way. At other times, it appears that some just don’t start out with much natural interest in anything, except maybe to have fun, and that possibly at someone else’s expense.

Seeing people do things, especially skilled things, has always made me want to learn to do like them. Seeing my dad milk the cows made me want to learn to milk a cow. Watching my granddad drive his pickup made me want to learn to drive.

Watching them handle the horses made me want to do that myself. Being a spectator at a basketball game left me restless; I wanted to play the game. Watching a race made me want to run fast.

Hearing the preacher on Sunday at church had me imagining how it might be to be up there preaching.

When I heard a great musician, I was wishing I could play the instrument like that. Watching a carpenter cut a board to size and nail it in place made me want to do that, too. Riding the school bus made me imagine myself as a school bus driver, or I was thinking, I bet if the driver got sick on the route I could drive the bus on into town if I had to.

Through most of my growing up days I assumed that I would be a farmer like Dad and like my Granddad Scott, and like great-Grandpa John. Of course I wasn’t going to imitate them in everything. Lots of things had changed as they worked through their lives. Greatgrandpa John had been a pioneer, bringing his family from Ohio to Arkansas after the Civil War, first farming at Dover, Ark., then between Elm Springs and Springdale, then between Brightwaterand Garfield. As his situation became more settled, he raised apples as his main money crop, and did general farming otherwise.

Grandpa Scott Nichols tried farming in northeast Oklahoma, but my Grandma Ellen didn’t like being so far from her folks, the Holcomb family of Elm Springs. They tried orchards at Garfield.

That didn’t work out too well. Then they moved to the farm north of Pea Ridge, planning to make money raising hogs. That was moderately successful, but the 1940s presented a difficult time for hogs, with the disease cholera often posing a problem. All the farmers we knew in the ’40s did a little of everything, even when they might try to rely on one crop or one type of livestock as a market item.

My dad sometimes had a few hogs, and usually about 200 laying hens, but his bigger focus was the herd of milk cows. Early on, we farmed our 100 acres with a team of two horses. I learned to drive old Pat and Mike early in my life, out in the hay field, moving thewagon from stack to stack as Dad forked the hay onto the wagon. As soon as my legs were long enough to push the trip pedal, I was driving the horses, raking hay with the dump rake. Weadded our first tractor, a 1945 Ford-Ferguson, in 1948.

With it, Dad bought a twobottom plow, a tiller, a cultivator for corn and a mowing machine. We already had a nearly-new, bright colored Case horse-drawn mower.

The new tractor mower had a longer sickle bar and cut faster, but it was always troublesome, required lots of repairs, and never was as fine and dramatic in the field as our horse-drawn mower. We sold the horsedrawn mower before I got big enough to learn to operate it.

I was allowed to take on some jobs on the farm that I later learned other kids were kept from doing because of the dangers. The work on a farm, working with cattle, working with machinery and tools, is never perfectly safe. Some kids were not allowed to get involved in the workon the farm because they might hurt themselves. It does seem to me, though, that kids don’t learn to work safely and carefully and don’t learn to enjoy accomplishing things unless they are well-taught, wellwarned and then allowedto handle some of the jobs that have an element of danger. We have to drive some nails in order to learn how to start a nail safely and to drive the nail home without smashing thumbs, and so on. I acknowledge that I hammered my thumb a few times.

In high school I developed considerable interest in engineering, thought I might become a designer of car engines, and I aspired to develop wind power for generating electricity. I always have enjoyed mathematics, and after a couple years of college, I was considering becoming a high school math teacher. But at the same time I was under a strong sense of call to the Christian ministry, and in 1962 I committed to carrying through on that call.

I’m still interested in all the kinds of work people do.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Community, Pages 5 on 09/21/2011