12/20/36
Dear Charley:
Thanks for the letter. I’m sorry I didn’t get to write sooner, but I’ve been quite busy, as usual.
You would get sick again. I guess the main reason I don’t seem to get sick is that I’m too busy to notice it when I do. Paul told me today that I had a cold for two weeks now, and I didn’t realize it until he told me. It seems to have parked itself in my chest, and now I have a cough just like grandfather has. Makes me right homesick to hear myself cough, hi.
My room-mate, Paul, didn’t go home this Christmas either. He has a job over at the Purdue cow barn, feeding the brutes. All the rest of the students went home yesterday, most of them leaving as soon as classes were dismissed at noon. The town is certainly quiet and peaceful. Most of the restaurants have closed for the holidays.
Paul and I bought a bunch of groceries today, and are planning on fixing our own lunches for the rest of the vacation. It has finally gotten cold enough so that we can use the window-sill for an ice box, and keep things quite well. We even have snow all over the ground. In case you have forgotten what snow is, it is that funny white stuff that falls instead of rain, up in the North country where your Buddy lives. We fixed up sandwiches with peanut butter, liver sausage, and cheese, and had tomato juice to drink. We didn’t have a knife to spread things on with, so we used my letter opener. Then we each had an apple. If we didn’t make any mistakes in our calculations, our lunches will only cost us about 15 cents each while it would cost us over 30 cents to get the same things in a café.
This afternoon, since I didn’t have any studying to do for tomorrow (classes were over Saturday), I went out to the barn with Paul and watched him work. The only thing I know about cows is that they get in the way at Cow Pasture Hill*, so I was quite interested to see how they fed and cared for them. The school has everything from a week-old calf to full grown cows out there. They are all ultra-special thoroughbreds etc. I had on my big mittens, and one of the calves sucked on the thumb of it for some time before it got disgusted and gave up the quest for moo-juice.
Paul and another man had a swell time trying to chase the dizzy critters into their respective stalls for feeding. The older animals knew just where they belonged, though, and walked right into place.
Cows are funny things. You feed black and brown cows on colorless water, brown hay or green grass, in red barns, and get white milk out of them. It’s too deep for me to explain.
They sure have it down to a system here. Most of the engineers spend a good part of their time designing automatic gadgets to help the dairy husbandry department, who in turn feed the engineers on good milk and butter so as to get better ideas. I have a swell idea along that line, but I don’t think they will like it. As I previously mentioned, the cows know which stall to run into. They use electric milking machines now. The trouble is that a man has to put on and take off the machines. Now with my system, as soon as the cow walks into the stall, the milking machine will reach up and grab on. It will automatically start milking as soon as it attaches itself properly. At the same time the cow will start eating. The feeding bin will be arranged so that as soon as the cow has emptied it, it will shut off the milker and remove the gadgets. You then put in as much food as the cow can eat in the time that it takes the cow to get milked. Then the cows practically milk themselves!
I went to a show last night with Paul Reedy’s wife, Nona. She and Paul and I have been going to shows together every Sunday all year. Paul had to go away to Indianapolis yesterday, and we were both lonesome as heck. She was without her husband and I was without one of my best friends. He is one of the instructors in the electrical engineering department. But since I had promised Paul to drop in on her so she wouldn’t get lonesome, I didn’t feel so badly about out with another man’s wife, hi. We went Dutch treats, of course.
We saw a show in which Zasu Pitts, the gal with the windmill hands, played the part of a detective. It was quite funny. She had to do all sorts of wild things, and she was scared stiff. We also saw another picture (double feature stuff) of Daniel Boone. It would have been ok, except that Daniel Boone was fat and sloppy, like a butcher or barkeep, and it looked somewhat ridiculous.**
Well, Charley, I wish I could send you something more than a letter for Xmas, but I can’t finance it. Give Sis a big kiss for me, and I’ll try to drop in on you some time in the next six months.
Love Buddy
**[Author’s note: I believe the movies referred to are “The Plot Thickens”, starring Zasu Pitts and “Daniel Boone” starring George O’Brien, 1936]
** “Cow Pasture Hill” was a place in Glen Ellyn where Buddy and his fellow Ham Radio operators would experiment with their equipment, presumably because of the elevation. Here are four photos from their first trip to the hill in the Spring of 1933. Also pictured are John Huntoon (w9kjy), Junie Valette (w9mci) and Jim Wilson (w9buk). Car was Junie Valette’s Ford.
