A lot has changed with agricultural practices since Everett Rau started farming, but his passion for working the earth has remained steadfast.
Long before produce was shipped across interstate highways in tractor-trailers, Rau remembers food on the table was typically what a family grew or bartered. The massive fluorescent lights of supermarkets would come eventually, with Rau at one point operating his own butcher store in Schenectady County.
“We did eat pretty much what we grew because Price Chopper hadn’t been invented yet,” Rau said.
Altamont Archives and Museum volunteer Laura Shore interviewed Rau Monday, June 23, in the community room at Village Hall. About 50 people attended the talk, which was also videotaped in the hope of using it for future educational purposes.
Rau, who owns Pleasant View Farm on his family’s land in Altamont, fondly remembers his first job as a young child collecting chicken eggs with a little basket.
Another job he recalled, maybe not as fondly, was cleaning the “thunder mug” from the rooms of boarders at the farm.
In the early 1930s, an outhouse was where people would relieve themselves. If it was nighttime and possibly raining, many would turn to the thunder mugs, also known as “thunder cups,” in their rooms.
“When breakfast was called, everybody went down to breakfast. Guess where I went?” he said. “I went up to the rooms to empty the thunder mugs.”
Farms with an extra room typically welcomed boarders during the summer, he said. For city residents, the country air was a welcome scent.
Farms still had their own special fragrance, he said, because “when warm weather came, that had a special type of perfume.”
“As a young fella, I talked to them, and they said, ‘Oh, the air is so pure and fresh.’ I said, ‘How can that be? We’ve got a big manure pile here and another over there,’” Rau said. “‘Oh,’ she said, ‘but you haven’t walked on a street in Flatbush in the summertime with a thousand horses going back and forth.’ And I don’t have to get verbal to tell you what they drop.’”
His mother would charge $22 per person, weekly room and board. The most guests sleeping at the farmhouse totaled 22 people.
“I think they piled them up like board wood,” he said.
The boarders were frequently served buckwheat pancakes, made from grain Rau’s brother planted on their farm.
Food preservation was key to staying fed yearlong, so anything grown with a surplus was canned or pickled. Rau saw a similarity between the big ocean vessels loaded with food and something more at home.
“At the end of the day, my mother would have two or three trays of canned food and I would open the cellar door … and made believe I was loading the hull of the ship,” he said, “because winter was coming, and you don’t pick beans in the wintertime.”
Rau said the Great Depression initially baffled him when he read about it in the newspaper. He said farm life had insulated his family from the economic downfall, he said.
“They were getting a bowl of soup, while when dinner was served at our place, there was plenty,” he said. “I did not know that there was a Depression until I read that some people had lost all their money.”
When his uncle lived with his family in 1937, Rau talked to him about how he could make a little extra money. His uncle told him to save three of his family’s pigs. In the spring, he had 77 baby pigs.
“They had just invented the electric fence, and that was a godsend,” he said. “Pigs are very, very intelligent. If they get burned a couple times, they know what the wire looks like. They know it’s going to tingle them, and they stay away.”
In the fall, he sold the pigs to a Scotia butcher, who gave him 7 cents a pound. The pigs averaged 200 pounds after being dressed, which was the weight the butcher based his payment. This was over $1,000 for the meat.
“That was the beginning of my idea that, yes, there could be a little bit of money made on the farm,” he said.
Rau was eager to help out anyone who was interested in learning how to farm.
“If there are one or two people in this group that have heard anything that helps them get over the hump of saying should I start a little garden … don’t be bashful and come up and see, and we’ll help you get started,” he said. “If there’s somebody here that is a stranger, you’re just a friend that I haven’t met.”
Village Mayor James Gaughan at the end of the talk presented a proclamation to Rau calling him “Altamont’s American farmer.”