Grandpa came to Canada with his mother and two sisters in 1922, when he was 17 years old. The reunited family (because of WWI, they had been separated from Great-Grandpa for ten years) rented a house in Edmonton. Grandpa’s first job was plucking chickens at Swift’s, a meat plant. I don’t know what kind of work Great-Grandpa did, or if Grandpa’s sisters, one older (Tillie) and one younger (Olga) had any jobs like house-cleaning or perhaps washing clothes.
In 1924 the family rented a farm two miles west of Bruce, the Sagert farms, the N1/2 of 26-48-15 W4. It was hard to get started farming. All field work was done by horses. Grandpa told me that he and Great-Grandpa went to a draft horse auction sale held every spring at the long-gone CNR stockyards, west of the former row of grain elevators beside the rail siding at Bruce. They were built to load cattle and horses from the Bruce area onto rail cars to be shipped to slaughterhouses in Edmonton. Those corrals were also the site of the first Bruce Stampede (in 1914) until 1916, when the Stampede grounds were moved to their present location.
The horses that were brought for auction were mostly horses with bad vices or habits or physical faults. Some were rank, unbroken three or four-year-olds. Most of these horses sold cheaply, just barely above slaughterhouse prices. Grandpa said they often bought several horses. Once they bought a good-looking, gentle, grey Percheron mare, very obviously blind in one eye. They put her beside another good, gentle horse, with the new mare’s blind eye to the inside, alongside her guide horse. He said she worked out very well, relying on the guide horse on her blind side. They used her for a number of years and raised several good foals from her.
The vices of the other horses they purchased included hard to catch, sudden bolting or trying to run away, or kicking or biting. They were able overcome many of the problems, but some were incurable. Some of the unbroken horses they purchased also turned out really well.
I’m sure Grandpa and Great-Grandpa attended most, if not all, the spring farm auction sales within a 10- or 15-mile radius of our farm. They probably bought both miscellaneous items and farm machinery, as well as cattle or horses at some of these sales. It was also a time for visiting with, and getting to know, other farmers in the area. Back then, there was a free lunch provided at all of the farm sales; the farmer’s wife and neighbour ladies baked for days in advance. Grandpa and Grandma’s farm sale on March 24, 1948 had a free lunch. And one auction bill much later on read, “Free coffee on the grounds as long as the grounds last.”
For the 1948 auction sale when Grandpa and Grandma sold all their furniture, machinery and livestock, Grandpa chose a young, up and coming local auctioneer named Mike Zowtuk.
Then our family moved to Chilliwack, B.C. I don’t remember any auction sales or events until after Grandpa and Grandma purchased The Mayfair Auto Court in 1950. (Not long after Grandpa got a new neon sign that said Mayfair Motel, a trendy new term to describe the smaller new motel units being built. The old auto courts had full kitchens, large bedrooms and even car garages.)
Grandpa went to a miscellaneous and furniture auction sale every Saturday in Chilliwack. He bought various furniture items for the motel and other household items as well. Once, he purchased a chest of drawers for the motel. When we pulled out all the drawers, we found an old WWI letter, written in 1917 by a Canadian soldier in Europe to his family in Chilliwack. I sent a copy of that letter to CBC’s Peter Gzowski years and years later, and it was published in his book, The Morningside Papers.
You could view, on a Friday afternoon or evening, the items that would be sold on Saturday. One Friday, when I was about 15 years old, I went along with Grandpa, and found an old, pre-WWII, I believe 1937, British-made Villiers motorbike in not very good shape. You had to pedal it, with some difficulty, holding the hand clutch in, and then, when you had gained some momentum, you released the clutch, the engine turned over and hopefully it would start. The motorbike was black and white, it looked really old and it didn’t run. I was quite enthused about it and showed it to Grandpa, who didn’t seem interested at all!
The next day at the sale, I moved away from Grandpa, determined to bid on the old machine. It started at $10 or $15 and was going up at $1 per bid. I bid a couple of times. Then I moved so I could see who was bidding against me. It was Grandpa, to my surprise and horror. I quit bidding and Grandpa bought the old motorbike. I never told him that I had been bidding. I got a school friend, Lawrence Joiner, to help me get it running at the Chilliwack High School Farm Mechanics Shop.
It was a beast to pedal and start. It only had one forward speed (no gears) and from a standstill, with the engine running, you still had to pedal it for a little ways before you could release the clutch. I sold it to another young fellow from school a year or two later. I don’t remember the price.
In the fall of 1958 we moved back to the farm in Alberta. We had very little farm equipment—a Massey 44 tractor, an 8-foot tiller, a 12-foot, single-disc John Deere grain drill and a few harrows.
Grandpa started going to auction sales in earnest. Many of them would have been with Mike Zowtuk as auctioneer. He bought all kinds of older, used (and some abused) farm machinery, like a Case K2 pull-type combine, a cultivator, a plow, better harrows and a lot of miscellaneous items. By then, there were rarely farm sales that still included livestock. These were sold at Edmonton or at auction markets that had sprung up in Camrose and Vegreville, so Grandpa went mainly to Camrose for his livestock purchases.
We put side-boards on Grandpa’s red 1957 Chev pick-up truck. They were on the truck permanently. Then we made what Grandpa called “slip on stock racks” that fit over the permanent side-boards to make a rather weak and rather low compartment for two cows, or perhaps three yearling heifers. Grandpa went to the Camrose Auction Market with the slip-on racks lying on the bed of his pick-up. If he bought a cow or two, he could put on the racks in a few minutes. If not, he could unload them quickly at home.
The cows could almost put their heads over the racks, but none ever jumped out. Nearly all of the beef cows Grandpa was buying were well past their best before date. They were someone else’s culls. Once he came home with two Hereford cows. One, the gentler one of the two, had an udder with one huge, hard, parsnip-shaped teat that almost touched the ground. Ben and I named her Parsnip. The other one was so wild my brother and I later named her Wirestretcher because she ran through a lot of fences as soon as we unloaded her!
Then, perhaps a year after we were back on the farm, Grandpa figured we could remodel the old horse stalls in the barn into farrowing pens for some sows. We were going into the hog business. Four of the six double horse stalls (meant for a team) were crudely and roughly made into sow pens. Grandpa bought bred sows at the Camrose Auction Market, which we let go into the pig pasture beside the old pig barn. Then we put them into the horse stalls when they got close to farrowing. Ben and I were supposed to take turns at night to watch the sows during farrowing, especially when it was cold, to save the little newborn piglets. The sow farrowing business is a story best told by itself. It had some memorably funny incidents.
However, if you have sows, it won’t be long until you require the services of a boar. One Saturday, Grandpa went to Camrose specifically to buy a boar. Late in the afternoon, I saw a Volkswagen coming down the road, followed closely by Grandpa’s red pick-up truck. The Volkswagen, driven by Grandpa, drove into the yard, followed by his truck, driven by a neighbour, Harry Tkaczyk. There was no boar. Grandpa had bought the Volkswagen “because it was going too cheap!” I told him the shape of the VW was quite similar to that of a boar, but it just couldn’t do the same job. (For the continuing story of Grandpa’s Volkswagen, Aunty Alice should write it for her grandchildren.)
One time there was a farm auction north and east of Viking. There were always good directions on the sale bill to the farm location, as well as the legal land description. Grandpa and I wanted to go to the sale. Going to Viking on paved Highway 14 would have meant going much farther south than necessary. Grandpa knew how to figure out directions from our farm by the legal land descriptions. He looked at the legal land description and thought out loud. “We’ll go to Floyd’s corner, go north to the Gas Line Road at Starky’s, then go east over Highway 36 about four miles, then go another two miles north. I think that should be close.”
I drove. We crossed Highway 36 and drove for a ways. Grandpa said at the crossroad, “This looks like a good road, turn north!” We drove north, crested a hill and could see in the distance rows of vehicles parked along both sides of the road. Grandpa had a GPS in his head for auction sales.
In the 1960s, the local auctioneer Mike Zowtuk joined forces with two younger auctioneers from towns south of us: Russ Sheets of Camrose and Dave Hutchinson of New Norway. They became Zowtuk, Sheets and Hutchinson Auction Service. They likely had most of the farm auctions north and east of Camrose—the Holden, Viking and Daysland areas. They had a special white canopy made for the back of their white, four-speed manual transmission, half-ton Chev auction truck. The canopy was high enough for the auctioneers and clerks to stand up comfortably out of the wind or rain or snow, or to be in the shade. Both sides had wide openings that folded out and down to become a shelf for the clerks to write on, or the auctioneers to lean on. It even had a single mike for the auctioneer and a loudspeaker mounted on the cab of the truck.
Somehow Grandpa, who was in his sixties or early seventies, got the job of driving the auction truck. He drove and stopped along rows of miscellaneous iron and junk, and then larger farm machinery. It was warm and cozy in the auction truck. Often another older farmer (or two) sat on the passenger seat and visited with Grandpa and warmed up on cold auction days. The auctioneers would order coffee and a sandwich or doughnuts sold at the sale by local ladies or a church group. By this time, there was no free lunch. They would add “and bring the same for Reinhold.”
Grandpa was a careful auction truck driver. He would start very slowly while releasing the foot clutch so as not to jerk the auctioneers or the clerks with their clip-boards. He would pull ahead to the next piece of machinery as soon as the auctioneer hollered sold! If Grandpa wasn’t paying attention and didn’t pull ahead when an item was sold, the auctioneer said gently, “Pull ahead Reinhold,” or tapped once or twice on the roof of the cab with his cane.
Once, Grandpa didn’t pull ahead. No one was in the cab with him and he had fallen asleep. The farmers laughed a little when the auctioneer said, “Our driver is having a nap!”
One wet spring auction day Grandpa was driving the truck through a very soft, but not obviously muddy, area. The truck sank and bogged down. The wheels began to spin with no forward movement. Grandpa didn’t lose his cool, or rev the engine and throw mud back at the crowd. He just sat still. The auctioneer called for some of the farmers to give a push and in a minute, with three or four men on each side of the truck, Grandpa eased out of the wet ground slowly and surely.
Grandpa and Grandma fully retired and moved to Edmonton in 1976. Years later, at an auction sale in our area, Mike Zowtuk said to me “Your dad was the best driver we ever had! He never jerked the truck; he knew when to pull ahead and exactly where to stop. I miss him.”
But here’s the Grandpa Lutz auction sale story that got me thinking about his auction sale purchases. This event came shortly after the Volkswagen-instead-of-the-boar purchase.
Grandpa came home from Camrose with the stock racks on, so brother Ben and I could see he had had a successful trip. On the back of the truck was a ram. A very wooly, very old ram with a huge wide set of perfectly matched, curled horns. A ram!
We didn’t have any sheep.
Grandpa’s reason for purchasing the ram? “It came into the ring and nobody wanted to bid on it! Then Joe Duggan (a Camrose livestock buyer and dealer) bid a dollar. I couldn’t let him have it for a dollar, so I bid two.”
Obviously, with the ram on the back of the truck Joe Duggan didn’t bid again.
The gentle old ram was halter broke too. We tied him in horse stall #1 and put some nice hay on the floor because he couldn’t have reached it inside the horse manger.
To continue with this story, you will require a little knowledge of the layout of the old barn. A feed alley, about four or five feet wide, ran down the centre of the barn. The milk cows, in wooden stanchions in the lean-to side of the barn, faced the feed alley. The horses, in the horse barn, also faced the feed alley. It made feeding the loose hay, forked down from the hayloft, much easier. The centre of the barn was wide open; the cows could look at the horses a few feet away and the horses could look at the cows.
The cows had a wooden manger in front of their wooden stanchions. We were milking eight or ten cows, separating the milk, selling the cream and feeding the skim milk to the calves and pigs. We put chop, that is ground oats, in a pile, perhaps an ice-cream pail full in front of every stanchion. It enticed the cows to come into their own stanchions and gave my brother and me time to lock all the stanchions before they ate very much of the grain.
So, it was time for milking. The ram was tied in horse stall #1, eating hay. Ben and I put grain in the manger in front of the cows. We opened the barn door. The cows came in and put their heads into the stanchions. All was normal.
The old ram lifted his head up as high as he could and looked across at the cows. The cow in stanchion #1 (I believe her name was Rosy) looked up and saw the wide, horny head of the ram in horse stall #1 looking back at her.
Rosy freaked out!
She let out a loud cow sound I had never heard before. It meant evacuate now! Every cow immediately pulled their head out of the open stanchion and followed the order given by Rosy. And the cows, rushing madly toward the door, did just that, evacuating everything, emptying their bowels of green contents from the grass they had been eating all day.
They shoved and pushed through the door, ran out and stood in a semi-circle, eyeing the barn for the monster that was still inside.
The ram didn’t care. He was still quietly eating the hay in horse stall #1.
We tied him to the fence by the pump house about 200 feet from the barn. We put in more grain before the wary and suspicious cows could be herded, very reluctantly, back into the barn. They kept looking nervously toward horse stall #1.
There was a lot of scraping and sweeping before we could milk the cows. They gave noticeably less milk. Some didn’t let their milk down at all!
Grandpa said he was going to find a buyer for the ram.
He phoned the Tkaczyks, then Hugh Curry, who had sheep. They didn’t need or want the ram. Hugh Curry said to phone someone in Viking (long distance) but they didn’t need a ram either. Tkaczyks said to phone so and so in Ryley who had sheep (long distance) but the Ryley people said they didn’t want the ram. By now Grandpa was giving the ram away!
There were no takers. Anywhere.
We tied the ram to the fence by the pump house in the morning before we even put chop in for the cows.
The cows were edgy, but more normal. They all let down their milk. Only two or three crapped in the barn.
We repeated the process before the evening milking. The ram was getting really easy to lead to his spot by the pump house.
That night Grandpa said he had made a decision. We were going to butcher the ram tomorrow morning after milking.
Our closest neighbour, Elwood Willans, who had been quietly enjoying our predicament, came over and talked to Grandma.
“When you put a roast from the old ram into the pot, put an old shoe into another pot. Put some water and a few onions in with the shoe. When the roast ram is done, throw it out and eat the shoe!”
The next day, after milking, Grandpa butchered the ram. He cut off the head with the wide, unusual horns and I put it on a post in the yard. We skinned it, we gutted it, and crudely, unprofessionally, cut it into pieces. There were quite a few pieces.
Grandpa gave away most of the meat, to whoever was willing to take it. He gave an extra big roast to the neighbour who said it would be better to eat an old shoe.
Everyone who had some of the meat said it was “pretty good.” Ben and I thought it was “edible.”
Grandpa liked auction sales.
Ben and I like them, too.