harvesting
My husband’s grandfather, Robert Knox was a hardworking man all his life. When I first met him, he was already retired, of course. Nevertheless, he was still working hard. Grandpa was the keeper of the vegetable garden. We all benefitted from the vegetable garden, but it was Grandpa who kept the garden. I got involved in some of the harvesting…we all did, but I don’t think Grandpa would have appreciated it if we tried to get out there and “tend” the garden. That was his domain, and you really should stay away from it. Seriously though, Grandpa loved his vegetable garden. It got his outside and kept him busy. He would probably have been bored silly without it…and Grandma would have had to figure out what to do with him if he was bored silly.
Grandpa was blessed on his 67th birthday with the coolest birthday gift ever…the birth of his third great granddaughter, Machelle (Cook) Moore. Grandma had been given that blessing with their first great granddaughter, Corrie (Schulenberg) Petersen, and Grandpa really wanted the same gift. A year and 5 months later, he was so blessed…and so happy. Sharing a birthday with a child, grandchild, or great grandchild is something that doesn’t happen for just anyone, so those who are so blessed, usually know just how rare a treat that is. Not very many people get to have that, and to have two in one couple is really rare.
Grandpa loved to read. He had a stack of books that was usually taller than he was. The funny thing was that he would read several at one time, and he could totally keep up with the story line on all of them. Western were his book of choice, which is typical for his era. He was born in 1908, and in during that and they subsequent eras, westerns were pretty much what was out there. I don’t know what he would think of some of the book of 
our time, but my guess is that he wouldn’t have liked them very much. I can’t say that I necessarily care much for most of them either. While we were two generations apart, and he probably though I was a silly girl when I first met him when I was just 17 years old, I grew to love that old man. Sadly, he died of cancer in 1985, when he was far too young. He was just 77 years old. Today is the 115th anniversary of Grandpa’s birth. Happy birthday in Heaven, Grandpa Knox. We love and miss you very much.
For a time, my grandfather, Allen Luther Spencer, worked in the lumber business. It started when he and my grandmother’s brother, Albert Schumacher, decided to go trapping in northern Minnesota. That venture didn’t go very well, and they just about froze to death. It was at that time that they decided to go into the lumber business. Being a lumberjack is no easy job, and was probably much more dangerous in my grandfather’s day, than it is now. Back then, lumberjacks, as they were called did everything from chopping down the trees, to cutting them with a saw, climbing up in the tree to get to the top. You name it, if it pertained to logging, they did it. They called it harvesting, and it begins with the lumberjack. The term lumberjack is not a term that is used much 
these days, because the modern way of harvesting is very different. Lumberjacks were pretty much a pre-1945 term. Hand tools were the harvest tools used, because there were no machines like what we have now.
The actual work of a lumberjack was difficult, dangerous, intermittent, low-paying, and primitive in living conditions, but the men built a traditional culture that celebrated strength, masculinity, confrontation with danger, and resistance to modernization. These days, there are a few people who actually celebrate the lumberjacking trade. Mostly it involves competitions, but just by watching, you can see that being a lumberjack was not a job for a weakling.
Lumberjacks, and their families, usually lived in a lumber camp, moving from site to site and the job moved. I 
know that my grandmother and my Aunt Laura spent time in the lumber camps. From what I’ve been told, the houses were little more that a log tent. They didn’t stay very warm, because there were gaps in the walls, and my guess is that they could only use a certain amount of wood a day, so it didn’t eat into the profits. I suppose that the owner of the logging operation made a good profit, but that doesn’t mean that the people who worked for them made a great deal of money, because they really didn’t. Being a lumberjack was really a far from glamorous occupation, and like most really physical jobs, not one that a man can do for too many years. Before long, my grandfather, like most lumberjacks, moved on to other jobs, in grandpa’s case the railroad.
