Lessons from the Farm

Boyhood Memories of an Ordinary Bigotry

We were as close to God as we were to our animals or as close to our animals as we were to God. I was born on a dairy farm in southern Wisconsin in 1933 where I lived with my parents, two brothers, two sisters, twenty-five cows, sixty chickens, one three-legged dog, and three semi-feral cats. It was a life of religious labor.