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By GORDON D. FIEDLER JR.

Salina Journal

Veda Young worked at the Pleating and Button Works in Salina while dating steady boyfriend Wallace Pihl, the Assaria-area farmer who would later become her husband.

The time was the late 1920s, when their weekly date night involved dinner and a movie that cost Wallace an entire dollar.

A theater ticket cost 35 cents, so a movie at the Strand or Grand would set her date back 70 cents.

"Then we'd go over to the Cozy Inn. You could buy a sack of hamburgers for 25 cents. That left him a nickel. He'd buy a bottle of pop and a paper cup and we'd sit in his car and he'd eat three hamburgers and I'd eat two and drink the bottle of pop. That was many years ago," said the 103-year-old Pihl. "He would talk about all the dollars he spent on us. We always had a lot of fun talking about that."

His investment eventually paid off. They married in 1929 and were together for decades.

"We lacked about two weeks of it being 74 years," she said of their long marriage.

He died at age 96 in 2003.

Pihl described her husband's unique, no-nonsense way he popped the question and how surprised she was about the concept of marriage.

Who will keep house?

Wallace Pihl had recently rented a farm with a house on the land, and the owner wanted Wallace to live there rather than have the place stand vacant.

"Are you going to get Alice to keep house for you? -- that was his sister," Veda Pihl said.

"He said, 'No, I'm going to have you keep house.' That was about how he proposed. I can still remember the feeling I had when he said that. I remember how funny that struck me. I never once thought about us getting married."

The move from a room in a boarding house on South 12th to a farm wasn't a big stretch for Veda Pihl.

"I was a farmer's daughter," she said during a visit to her apartment at Eaglecrest Retirement Community.

Her parents farmed 3 1/2 miles southeast of Assaria and Veda learned farm work at an early age, milking cows, feeding chickens, pitching hay. This was an era when agriculture was less mechanized and more hands-on.

Farming with horses

"My dad didn't have a tractor. He farmed with horses," she said. "I think, seriously, today I could help hook up a team. The horses all had names. Those horses all knew me and I knew them."

It wasn't unusual for a young Veda to drive the buggy by herself to piano lessons in Bridgeport.

"That horse knew more about where to go than I did," she said.

She attended elementary school in Assaria and graduated from Assaria High School in 1927, one in a class of 15 -- nine boys and six girls.

After high school and with no firm career plans, she moved to the big city of Salina and found work at the dress firm ironing or steaming pleats in dresses six days a week.

"I got five dollars a week," Veda said, still sounding surprised at such a wage. "That was good pay, just about a dollar a day."

Dancing was a sin

She roomed with another young woman who worked as a telephone operator. Nightlife then wasn't what it is today. When she wasn't burning through Wallace's dollar bills, she and other young girls played cards or read in their rooms.

"I read a lot," she said.

Any social activity more provocative would have been out of the question. Dancing, for instance.

"Oh, no. God, no." Veda said. "It was sinful to dance."

By the time a slow two-step across a sawdust floor no longer would have left a moral stain, Veda was too busy, having graduated from farmer's daughter to farmer's wife.

Before their three children came along, it was just Veda and Wallace.

"He and I harvested wheat," she said. "He would drive the combine and I would drive the truck into the elevator and back. I hauled thousands of bushels of wheat."

No money? Let's barter

The Pihl farm was typical of its time and place. And like other farms during the Depression, money was tight, forcing folks to barter.

It was the method Veda Pihl used to "buy" a two-year subscription to a farm magazine and a cookbook.

When the magazine salesman called, she noticed he had a cage of chickens hanging off the car.

"I gave him a couple of old hens. We didn't have any money so we gave him the chickens," she said.

They ate what they raised, traded for the rest or did without.

Eggs were a common medium of exchange. Veda said eggs were selling for eight cents a dozen wholesale, a price she thought was too low.

"I think an egg should be worth a penny, and I still think so," she said.

They sold five gallons of cream for 15 cents but also received the butter.

"They would take the butter out and I wouldn't have to churn it," she said.

Benefits of electricity

Electricity improved farm life, Veda said.

"It sure did," she said. "The first thing I got was an electric iron. I had a little gasoline iron. It had a little tank on the back of it."

Before that, she used a sad iron, sad being an old English word for "solid" but taking on a different meaning for those who used them, as they were cast-iron appliances that had to be heated on a stove.

"They were well named," Veda said.

Life eventually eased considerably, and when the Pihls semi-retired from farming, they bought a motor home and became snowbirds, spending winters in Texas. They also traveled across the country and into Canada.

Happy on the farm

What for many may have been a lifetime of drudgery, farm life left Veda Pihl with fond memories.

"We were happy on the farm," she said. "We enjoyed the farm. We had a great time."

OK, maybe there was some aspects that were not so great, such as chickens.

"What I liked best about the chickens is when we sold them and I got the money," she said.

--Gordon D. Fiedler Jr. can be reached at 822-1407 or by email at gfiedler@salina.com.

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