Back in My Day

By Reagan ConnellyMarcella Beachler was born in 1934 a few miles north of the Kansas/Nebraska border.Beachler married her husband Roscoe in 1954 and together they had three children, Laurie, who lives in Lincoln, Michael, who lives in Fairbury, and Terry who died young while serving overseas.The best vacation Beachler said she’d ever been on was when she and Roscoe went to Canada to visit some friends. “Oh gosh Canada is beautiful. It is beautiful!” she said. They stayed with their friends in Canada for about a week and then drove home, going through California on the way.“We loved to travel a lot,” she said.Beachler was raised on a farm in a house her father built and spent most of her time working with her father. “I was the oldest and then there was Laurie and my brother, Delbert. And I was with Dad all the time. I just had to be with Dad all the time instead of staying in the house, but Laurie ended up staying in the house,” she said.“I was always out with Dad doing something and so, later, I got older and when I got to be 15 or 16 I had to be with Dad all the time, so I learned to drive the farm truck,” she said. “I tell you, that was heaven, I had a lot of fun.”Beachler said no matter what her father was doing, she was always by his side, “Oh I miss him,” she said. “But I tell you what, if he needed help with something, I helped him. I didn’t want to stay in the house. My sister had to, but me? No, I went with Dad, no matter what.”“I was always busy,” Beachler said. One of her many chores was to separate the cream from the milk after she milked the cows. She also had to bottle feed the newborn calves.“Then those calves would go suck the other calves’ ears. I tell you, I’d say ‘Quit that!’ but no,” she laughed. “But I did enjoy the farm.”Beachler’s grandma moved in with the family when Beachler was quite young. “When grandpa passed away grandma moved in with us. In those days that’s what happened. If one of them passed, the other came and stayed with their children.”Beachler remembers one time when a tornado came from the northwest. “It came up real fast with all the wind,” she said.She remembers that her mom had gone around the house making sure everything was ready for the storm, but she’d forgotten one upstairs window on one side of the house. “And Dad wasn’t home,” she explained. “He was out farming or haying or something.”Suddenly in the midst of the storm, her mother remembered the window. “We went up there and there was water everywhere, and I tell you, we were scooping water and picking up towels and doing anything to get that rain off that floor all the time that storm was going. All that time we didn’t even think about how we could’ve gotten took,” she said.Beachler went on to say that the house and her father were ok when the storm ended and she and her mother had managed to get all the water out of the room. “We got missed. We got the heavy rain but that was when that tornado went into Hebron and it caught a few homes,” Beachler said. “Then it went into Humboldt and took some things along the way, but we got missed. We were lucky. We got the heavy rain and everything.”Beachler said the flooded room happened to be the farmhand’s room, so he wasn’t home when the storm came but they managed to get it all cleaned up before he came back.Beachler said her cousin Eddie fought in World War II. “He was over there right where Hitler was,” she said. “Eddie came home but a lot of soldiers were lost in World War II.”“I wish now I had the magazines that had all the stories and pictures of what was going on over there with Hitler and everything,” Beachler said. “But don’t ask where they’re at. They’re long lost now.” She added that maybe there were some in museums and encouraged people to read them.She remembers reading about Hitler in the newspapers and hearing the adults talk about him. “That was a mean man that Hitler, oh nobody liked him, they wanted to kill him so fast,” she said. “And they finally did, well he did it to himself.”Beachler remembers the unpredictability of the war, “We never knew what Hitler was going to do,” she said.Beachler also remembers listening to Elvis and watching him on TV. “He could sing and my Dad would say, ‘Why do you want to listen to that?’ Well, you know how older folks are.”Beachler met her husband, Roscoe, on her school bus. “Dad would take me to the bus, of course the bus would go around to the farms on the highway and Dad would take us and some other kids and me and my sister and he would go up to the highway and the bus would pick us up there on the highway,” she said. “Roscoe was on that bus but I never thought I’d really meet him. He was about four years more than I was, so if I was a freshman, he was a senior. And I didn’t think nothing about him and then all the sudden I kinda liked him and he did kinda like me too. And there we go!”Beachler said the age difference did worry her at the time, “I was just a freshman and my mom said, ‘You’re not going to have no dates while you’re just a freshman.’ But later on we dated and of course my dad always said, ‘You gotta be home by a certain time!’ And I did.”When Roscoe did ask her out, Beachler said he had to ask her dad’s permission too. “He asked me and I said, ‘Well I’ll ask Dad but you’d better ask Dad too.’ So then I kinda dated him.”When Roscoe graduated High School, he joined the service and fought in the Korean Conflict. “He went overseas to Guam, and he said that island wasn’t the biggest island.” Beachler said the island was so small there was barely room for the runways for the planes.Roscoe was there for about two years and he and Beachler wrote each other letters. “I was 18 or 19 when he came home. I barely knew him and I had some dates while he was gone but yet I loved him more and so when he got home, he asked ‘Could we get married?’ and I said, ‘At 19?’ and in those days they did. And I said, ‘Well you gotta go ask Dad.’ And I was kinda scared you know.”So, Roscoe asked Beachler’s father for her hand in marriage, “Well my dad didn’t say anything for awhile because he knew he was gonna lose a daughter, but eventually said yes and we got married.”

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