Summers with the Setzkorns.
Curt Boger
It can be hard to know where to start when inscribing stories from life, since potential readers need varying levels of context to properly relate to them. So I will start here by saying that the Boger and Setzkorn names are linked in ways that are “complex and deep”. My great-grandfather Johannes Boger and his wife Elizabeth begat lot of kids, including William and Wilhelmina (Minnie). William married Josephine Harms and begat Glenn Boger, my father. Wilhelmina married Theodor Setzkorn, the union of which produced William Setzkorn (and others). Many other Bogers also married other Setzkorns as apparently the available and acceptable gene pool was rather shallow.
All of which to introduce you to the William “Bill” Setzkorn referenced in this story, my first cousin once removed. An affirmed bachelor for much of his life, he married Betty Mallonee and they produced Ted, Marsha, and Sandy, all of whom are a few years younger than me.
During the time period in which the following events took place, Bill and Betty farmed the Setzkorn homestead and more, raising beef cattle, wheat, and milo, 10-12 miles northwe
And so we fast forward to the summer of 1977, when at an impressionable 17 I was called to be the next student at the academy. My education would require 3 full summer seasons to complete, and the following contains some of the most memorable lessons during that time. These are true accounts, with the caveat that perhaps they contain some personal embellishments by me.
I was paid for working on the Setzkorn farm, which now amazes me. I’m sure the repair bills from what I broke more than equaled the value of my labor. Besides the value of the education, it was far too entertaining and too much like living at home for them to be paying me, especially as such a young pup. But the cash kept me in college long enough to graduate, and for that I am forever in their debt.
Entertainment…. Ah yes, there was lots of it, from the day the letter from Bill would arrive asking me “ifn I was acommin” down that way this year, to the “mishaps” with various pieces of machinery on the farm. Though my college buddies thought the way Bill wrote enormously funny (he wrote as if he were speaking to you, in the pure Kansas Farmer dialect of what appears to be English), his technique made the letters just that much easier to read. When you opened the envelope and started reading, you could hear that firm, staccato voice of his, just as if he were standing in the same room.
In the days I spent working on the farm, regular mechanical maintenance was something we never managed to find a time slot for in the schedule. The most poignant example of this was “the fuel wagon”. This once teal-green Chevrolet, minted in the early 1960’s had everything you could ask for, with the operative word being “had”. Its prime years had been enjoyed during the Johnson administration. At this point the most recent combustion stroke in at least 3 of its 8 cylinders were but a distant memory. It had a shimmy that precluded holding onto the steering wheel with both hands for any amount of time, a serious pull to the right (or was it left?), and of course not a hint of any remaining brake system. What use might there be for such a vehicle on a farm in the 20th century? Refueling truck.
Load it with 200 gallons of gasoline and another 250 of diesel fuel, put a 15-year-old unlicensed city kid (Mike) at the wheel and you have achieved nirvana.
One memorable night during the wheat harvest, we had just finished one 80-acre field and would start on another the next morning. For the night then, we were going to take all the vehicles back to the farm. I was first with 15 tons of fresh wheat loaded onto “Junior” ( a late-60s model powder-blue Chevy with a huge steering wheel that could easily rip your arms from their sockets). Behind me was the aforementioned Mike, Betty’s young nephew, driving the fuel wagon. It was late even by harvest standards, and I was looking forward to a little sleep before the next 15-hour day. As I was slowing to turn into the driveway, I turned my head to check the mirror, and instead was greeted with the surreal. It was Mike, face slightly visible in the dashboard glow, at the wheel of the fuel wagon, eerily and quietly passing me in the ditch. Now, of course the passenger side window was permanently
in the down position in the fuel wagon, so as the fuel wagon’s cab was passing mine, Mike calmly turned his head toward me and said (in a voice loud enough that only I could hear ) “I have no brakes”. I can see and hear it like it was yesterday. Miraculously he guided his supertanker back into the shipping lanes without incident.
Now for reasons known only to the Almighty, it seems that the most embarrassing things happen to us when the people we least would like to see them are watching. One day in the harvest field the fuel wagon had been backed up to the combine to service it, done in such a way that the tailgate was situated right between the header and the right drive wheel. This made it very convenient for fueling and checking the oil and water in the engine mounted just above. After finishing, Bill climbed back in the combine and started away to cut more wheat, just as neighbor and fellow farmer Denny Wilson was driving into the field in his pickup. Of course, someone had forgotten to move the fuel wagon away from the combine, and Denny watched in amusement as the tailgate was ripped from the fuel wagon.
The Setzkorns have owned a cabin on a little Xanadu in south central Kansas for many years, called “99 Springs”, or ‘99’ for those familiar with it. It is the finest 25-acre oasis on the face of the Earth. Nestled in a small valley full of old Cottonwood and Elm amidst the beastly hot and parched landscape of south-central Kansas, this little lake sports some of the cleanest water I have ever seen, always at the perfect temperature for swimming. The weekends we spent here were another way I found myself overcompensated for the work I was doing, as the students such as I were always invited along.
It was our habit on Sunday mornings at ‘99' to go to church in Medicine Lodge (a short drive to the south in the Setzkorn family station wagon) where our presence (Bill, Betty, Ted, Marsha, Sandy, myself, and whichever friends one of the girls had invited along for the weekend) would usually cause the number of worshippers to double. After that, there was an unconditional stop at “the Little Store” (aka Roger’s Store) for a copy of the Sunday edition of the Wichita Eagle-Beacon, and perhaps a Mountain Dew or something else (As I recall Roger was running pretty much a one-man show; the store was stocked with so much stuff that the aisles were as cramped as the sleeping quarters on a WWI submarine), then it was back to the cabin for a hard day of swimming and fishing, and of course Bill reading the "funnies" to Sandy (especially Prince Valiant).
One glorious weekend, as was his habit whenever possible, Betty’s 90+ year-old father “Guy” had come along with the family for a getaway from his home in Dodge City. A merciless card player, Grandpa’s other great passion was fishing. As we arrived back from our trip to town, I saw that he was down at the water’s edge in his lawn chair, fiddling with his reel. That was his spot, and a concrete pad had been poured there so his lawn chair would have a level surface. Cottonwood and other trees towered overhead along the bank of the lake. Fifty feet or so of weed-grown shoreline separated this spot from the cabin’s boat dock, where a 12-foot rowboat was moored. I ducked quickly inside to don my cut-off jeans that passed for swimming trunks since it was already over 90 degrees on another pristine summer morning in south central Kansas.
No sooner had I finished dressing when from upstairs came a burst of uproarious laughter from Betty such as I had never heard before, nor since. I rushed outside to see the rowboat now ½ full of water but devoid of passengers, rocking back and forth just offshore from Grandpa like an abandoned lifeboat. Standing next to it waist deep in the weedy water was the completely soaked Bill, still in his church clothes, Grandpa’s now un-snagged hook and line in his right hand. It has now been decades, but I have yet to see anything to match the humor of that scene.
So many of life’s lessons have to be experienced to really have meaning. Working with cattle brings about such opportunity with alarming regularity. One hot dry morning with the 9 AM sun already beating down on us, we were working cattle through the “chute” at the Setzkorn homestead (In the “chute” all kinds of horrors awaited the beasts. We removed horns, gave shots, and other things. As a group they were generally unappreciative of our efforts). One particular critter that morning went considerably out of his way to vent his displeasure. He broke free while actually locked in the chute, accomplishing this by splitting some rather significant steel bars. He (and I use the term loosely at this point) gave us all a quick look as we scattered to the fences, then took off on a dead run, due east. As he quickly disappeared in a cloud of dust, we were all more than a little glad to have him gone and knew that there was a mile of
pasture between him and the next fence. Bill grabbed a rope and took off in pickup truck A to head him off. Those of us that remained were supposed to load up some more ropes and meet him. We quickly gathered the gear we would need to subdue this beast and off we went. We drove the mile east to the next road, looked up and down that road and … nothing (This being Western Kansas and all, that surprised us. Generally you can see from 10 miles away who is coming to visit so as to not get caught doing anything embarrassing). We drove up and down roads, back to the farm, out into the pasture…. still nothing. Finally, off in the distance to the south we saw an approaching cloud of dust on the road. As it got closer we recognized Bill’s pickup and went to meet him. We pulled up alongside, driver side windows next to each other to hear the story. All he said was “follow me”. We waited for him to turn
around, then followed as we went east a mile, then turned south. On we went for seven miles. We stopped to open a gate to a pasture, went in, drove up and down ravines and through mud and other stuff. Finally we stopped on the side of a hill and there across the draw stood the beast, still huffing and pawing the ground. We looked at him. He looked at us. Out of his earshot, we discussed our plan of attack. Bill had somehow gotten a rope on the beast, but the end of that rope now dangled behind him, some 20 or 30 feet back. The plan then was to drive one of the pickups onto the rope end, at which time some sucker would get out and grab the rope and tie it off to one of the pickups. We sprang reluctantly into action. By some miracle, part A of the plan worked, and I managed to drive onto the end of the rope, stopping the beast in its tracks. We were granted a second miracle and the rope was tied off without incident. All we had to do now was lead this beast to a place
where we could load it up and take it home, so we started toward a ranch we knew about, just over the next hill. The beast at this point was tiring out, and Bill decided it a second rope on the beast would be good insurance. Since the beast was tired, Bill was able to stop, slip the second loop over its neck, and then call for me to come get the end of the rope to tie it off. Now as it turned out, the whole “I’m tired” act by the beast was a ruse. As soon as I took one step toward the beast he threw Bill off and charged. I was a faster runner then, but not faster than this enraged creature. He hit me from behind just as he reached the end of the first rope, which sent me flying through the air, like a paper mache rodeo clown. I landed out of his reach, in a prickly pear cactus bush. The rest of that day is a blur.
A big part of the educational system on the Setzkorn farm involved repairs. I learned to fix (or at least try to fix), just about anything, and usually with parts that were not OEM in nature. It really was a matter of necessity, as we were 20 miles from any repair shop, and there was really no way the farm could make the bottom line look good if someone else were paid to do repairs, if you could indeed find anyone to do them at all.
Hood latches were one example. If one stopped working, a few twists of baling wire would work just fine (or so we thought). One particularly windy, hot, summer afternoon during wheat harvest I was flying down US 283 south of Jetmore, on my way back to the field after delivering a few hundred bushels of hard red winter wheat to the elevator, when I met a semi who apparently also was ignoring speed limits. The sum of all wind velocities being probably in excess of 200 mph, instantly the hood from the truck I was driving wrapped itself over my windshield and in a fraction of a second I went from having a panoramic field of vision that extended to the flat-as-a-pancake western Kansas horizon, to… nothing; just the blue metallic finish of the outside of the hood. I was now piloting in IFR conditions. Using the only guides I had, which were the highway stripe lines I could see in the right
and left rear-view mirrors, I managed to guide the craft to a safe stop at the side of the highway where I dismounted and retied the baling wire so my journey could continue. I don’t remember thinking I was ever in any danger, being an immortal 19 years old.
On another occasion I can recall doing work to remove the heads from a pickup truck engine (I’m guessing to replace head gaskets, but it’s been a long time) when things got a little hectic in the shop. Bill and I had broken a head bolt off in the block of the engine and the stub needed to be removed or we were stuck. Naturally in our haste we had not blocked off the fuel lines when we took off the intake manifold and carburetor, so gasoline had been dripping everywhere while we had been working. What was our first choice to remove the bolt remnant? Acetylene torch. In seconds the entire engine compartment was engulfed in flames. Bill tossed me a big old winter coat that was being used for a rag, ran to the well for the hose and said, “put it out!” I grabbed the coat, started smothering the flames and yelled “I can’t!” He yelled back “You have
to!” By the hand of God on that rag, I got the flames on top to go out. I looked underneath and saw flaming splashes of gasoline still striking the ground underneath the engine like medieval firebombs. As implausible as this sounds, I BLEW them out (Breath of God, no doubt).
Undeterred and with the fire now out and the experience gained, we plugged the fuel lines, lit the torch back up, and finished our work.
No, I don’t recall the presence of fire extinguishers…
Often lessons at the academy were delivered “under fire”. One such lesson was taught (again during harvest) using Henry, the vintage 1950’s black, cab-over truck that was used to haul cattle, wheat, or whatever it needed to (Henry’s engine was overhauled while I was there, and he could flat-out fly, but his speedometer didn’t work. Several times people told me they were doing 70 and couldn’t catch up. The dash lights didn’t work either, so if you got stopped at night you had two excuses for ignorance of your speed). On the way back to the field from one trip to the elevator, Henry sputtered, backfired, stalled, and would not go another inch. Broken distributor shaft. We towed him back to the field, and someone was sent to town for the part while combining continued using the one remaining truck. Once filled, we would be shut down until Henry was back on the mend. The second truck was
filled about the time the part arrived in the field, and Bill said, “Ok, put that in and meet me on the next round of the combine”. I looked at him like he had grown horns. An hour earlier I had been blissfully unaware that something called a distributor shaft even existed. But he described how it worked, jumped back on the combine and off he went, leaving me with my mouth open and filling with flying wheat chaff.
So, the 17 year-old-me assessed things. I did at least understand the very basics of ICEs. The spark plug wires were still connected to the distributor cap, so I did not have to worry about messing up the firing order (1-5-4-2-6-3-7-8 for those keeping score) as long as I kept that intact. So I reasoned I only had to a) figure out when cylinder 1 was at top of the cylinder (TDC) on the combustion stroke and b)find out which wire went to #1 from the cap, and then c)align the rotor atop the distributor shaft with that position on the cap, drop it in, and bolt it down.
Two problems remained: which cylinder was #1? How would I tell it was at the top of the cylinder? I recalled from watching Harry Burns overhaul the engine how Ford numbered the cylinders, so that was solved, number one was closest to the cab on the driver side. I reasoned that to find TDC I just had to take out #1 spark plug and stick a wire in to feel the piston and crank the engine one small bit at a time, getting back out to check the wire each time until it reached the peak. Boom.
Feeling cocky now, I pieced it all together and tried the starter (recall that Henry was a cab-over so with the cowling removed, the engine is in essentially in the cab resulting in no secrets between you). Bright orange flames shot out of the carburetor! Now what? Thinking back to Harry again, I remembered that the piston is also at the top of the cylinder during the exhaust stroke. I had the timing with respect to the crankshaft essentially 180 degrees off. I quickly made the adjustments to the distributor, and this time Henry burst to life without pyrotechnics. After adjusting the timing by ear, I closed the cowling and roared out to meet the combine just as Bill finished the round. As I drove up, he said nothing as he pulled the lever to start the unloading auger. His face showed no reaction, but I have to believe it was all he could do to hide his shock (I know that was true for me). In fact no words were ever spoken between us about this event. I have no doubt this was a purposeful lesson in self-confidence, and it was enormously impactful on who I am today.
These are a few of the things I remember during those years. I am forever grateful for the experiences and would not trade them for anything.
Curt Boger
July, A.D. 1999, Edited A.D. 2020