A Vineyard farm kid, 1922

In 1922 Rex Blake was eight years old, and he was given a job that mattered. The cows were his to milk.

His parents had moved to Utah County and bought a Vineyard farm with few improvements. They built almost everything themselves, new buildings included. Like most children on the small farms of the valley, Rex worked from the time he was old enough to carry a bucket.

The family had built a fine herd of dairy cows, and that was exactly the problem. There were no milking machines. Every cow was milked by hand, every day, and it all had to be done before school.

Milk on the morning train

The milk was the family's cash. Each day horses pulled a wagon loaded with milk cans about two miles to the milk house. From there the railroad carried it to Clover Leaf Dairy in Salt Lake City. It went winter and summer, seven days a week, Rex remembered, because people did not have refrigerators.

Vineyard's farmers had reason to be proud. In 1928 a county newspaper wrote that no region in the United States beat Utah County as a dairy center. The county's historian credits the climate, the high quality of local alfalfa hay and beet pulp from the valley's sugar factories.

Cold feet

Winter was the hard part. Rex's feet froze during chores until he came down with chilblains, the painful, itchy sores cold leaves on toes and fingers. When he came inside, he put his feet in the oven to warm them.

After milking came a fast breakfast and a walk of a mile and a half to the Vineyard School. The children left at half past eight to make the nine o'clock bell. After school they walked home and started the chores again. There was not much time to study, Rex said, or for much of anything else.

Home was plain. No refrigerator, no central heat, a cold house in winter. Water was heated on the kitchen stove, and on Saturday night the children bathed in a round tin tub, several of them in the same water.

Tomatoes and hard times

Money was tight across the valley. Prices for crops had dropped fast after the First World War, and farm work in the 1920s was still slow and hard. Yet Vineyard's fields fed people far away. In 1924 the Pleasant Grove Canning Company announced it was ready for tomatoes from Provo Bench, Vineyard and Lake View, and asked girls who wanted jobs to come to work the next day.

The Model A

Rex's favorite memory came in 1928, when the family bought its first truck, a Ford Model A. He was fourteen. Nobody had a driver's license then, and he drove it anyway. Learning to shift the gears himself and make it go, he said, made him feel quite grown up.

Six years passed between the first cold morning with the cows and that first drive. We know about them because Rex remembered out loud, and his words went into the history of Utah County.