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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Huckleberries Online

Bill Hall: A Tilted Fence Of Then & Now

Bill Hall/Lewiston Tribune columnizes: "My parents were farmers in their younger lives in an era before power equipment had arrived in that line of work. Their power equipment was horses, the strong back of my father and the pure unmitigated fortitude of that generation. And while I have had to sweat for a few hours over replacing three fence posts, my father probably averaged that many each month on the farm. He did hard farmer labor day after day, year after year. He dug rocks out of fields. He repaired steel wheels on farm implements. He spent hours tilling and planting and harvesting. And in summer, my father would get up in the middle of the night and go divert the irrigation water from one field to another. My mother worked as hard in her realm of the kitchen and garden, harvesting and canning and cooking on a wood stove in the oppressive summer heat. For good measure, she and my father hand-milked a dozen cows twice a day." More here.

Question: Do you work as hard at manual labor as your parents did? 



D.F. Oliveria
D.F. (Dave) Oliveria joined The Spokesman-Review in 1984. He currently is a columnist and compiles the Huckleberries Online blog and writes about North Idaho in his Huckleberries column.

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