In Kenneth's own words, part 9

(1943) Eau Claire, WI, continued..

I got another set of Elders, Stanley Bauden and Orange F. Peel. They were older men in their 70’s and they worked together. They did a wonderful job there because they appealed to older people in the community. Most of the people in Wisconsin were either Lutheran or Catholic and we did a lot of work out in Eleva Wisconsin and Montague while I was there. I got there the last of April and there was still snow on the ground, when I got up to Eau Claire. On the 28^th of October we were out to Eleva, Wisconsin to hold a cottage meeting and got snowed in for 3 days out there. So I helped milk cows and do whatever. It was a dairy farm. We weathered it through and came back home. I can’t remember if anything of interest happened out there or not but anyway I remember one time I got showed a thing or two. I thought I really knew how to milk cows so they were milking 35 head of big nice Holsteins and there was the man and his wife, 2 sons and 2 daughters that were milking the cows by hand. They had a beautiful barn, their house wasn’t much, but the barn was nice, it even had a bathroom in it. The house didn’t have a bathroom in it. But anyway, I said I’ll help you milk, I was going to show them about Idaho milkers. So I sat down and milked the first cow and strained the milk and sat down to the 2^nd cow and milked her and thought oh boy my wrists were starting to feel like they were going to fall off. So I thought, well I’m far enough ahead, I’ll just take it easy. I looked up and they were all standing there waiting for me to finish, they had finished theirs. So I had my come-up-ins. Anyway, I finished that cow and I didn’t challenge them anymore. That was too much! I found out I wasn’t such a good cow milker.

Another experience we had. We slept up in the attic on corn shuck mattresses, the only problem with them was, they hadn’t taken all the cobs out and you’d work the cob over with your hand to where you could sleep and then your companion would work it back. We had kind of a strange night because the wind was whistling through the eaves and it was a little difficult. I had one interesting thing happen with Elder Chabot, as I mentioned before, he had night mares and I came home from doing an audit one night late and I unlocked the door and came in and he jumped out of bed and came over and put a neck lock on me and nearly strangled me. I looked down and he didn’t have any shoes on so I stomped on his toes and that woke him up and he apologized and patted me on the back and went back to bed. A few nights later, I woke up and the bed was shaking so bad that I thought we were having an earth quake. So I looked and his head wasn’t visible. He’d gotten turned around in bed and was down at the foot of the bed and we had an iron bedstead and he had hold of 2 pieces of the bedstead, and he’d held on them so long that his arms were shaking and that was what was shaking the bed. So I woke him up and got him straightened up. Those are the only incidents I had with him, but other missionaries had had some with him. But he was a good missionary. He had 2 aunts living there in Eau Claire. He was from Canada originally, he’d been Catholic up until about 3 years before and the family had joined the church, and he came out on a mission. We were able to visit his 2 aunts occasionally, but we didn’t convert them but they didn’t convert us either. But we had some good times in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. We did country work in which we went to every town that had a branch (there were no wards, there wasn’t a ward or a stake in my whole mission) and there were 6 states in the mission. Anyway we had several branches and we’d go around and do country work even up in the upper Michigan peninsula. We’d go up there and that was part of our mission. And we got everywhere, we went to Milwaukee, Ann Arbor (I know Ann Arbor is in Michigan) anyway several of the places. Janesville Wisconsin, Wausau, Sturgeon Bay, Green Bay, Iron River, Iron Town and Madison, we went to all of them. And got over the whole state, it was interesting.