Allie Albertine, Curmudgeon - Nez

  Allie Albertine, Curmudgeon

By Nez Nesmith

Townsfolk referred to him as the “mad Hungarian”. He mostly kept to himself, rarely smiled, was usually angry, obviously didn’t like being around people. But you couldn’t really talk with him because he usually didn’t respond. And if he did speak, he yelled. The essence of Allie was that he was a lonely and sad man. That was my definition of a curmudgeon. And yet he was an interesting character with contradictions. 

Allie Albertine, our curmudgeon in Lyman, Washington, in the 1950’s, ran one of the most productive and successful dairy farms in the state. Carnation Milk Company sent tank trucks to the farm every other day to collect about 800-900 gallons of milk from stainless steel tanks in the farms’ milk house. 

Allie was the youngest of eight Albertine children. There were three girls and five boys. Their parents had emigrated from Hungary in the late 1800s’s. All of the Albertine kids were born at home in Lyman, where they were raised and schooled. 

Allie and Frank, the oldest boy, and Della, the youngest girl, kept the Albertine Family farm going. Ernie, another brother, was married and had his own dairy farm about four miles to the west, and Mary, a sister, and her husband Bill Trueman, had yet another dairy farm about a mile east of Lyman. Dairy farming was in their blood. Allie was in charge of the Albertine Family farm in Lyman, Della kept house, did the payroll and books for the farm and cooked, and Frank tended the vegetable garden and fruit orchard and helped out wherever he could, and sneaked a drink whenever he could. All three were single. They knew almost everybody in town, yet rarely left the farm, except for Frank driving their beautiful black 1952 Buick to the tavern a couple of nights each week.  

At one time or another most Lyman boys worked for Allie in their teenage years. I was no different, except that I worked for him longer than most. Allie typically fired or ran off most of his workers within a few days, weeks or months. Anyway, when I worked for Allie in 1957 and 1958, we milked around 50 cows twice daily. 

Instead of running the cows through a milking parlor Allie used the huge old barn, which was kept in tiptop shape and was painted white, inside and out. There were rows of stanchions on both sides of the barn, with the feed and hay area in the middle, with a huge hayloft above. One side had 15 stanchions, the other 18, so initially we in 33 cows in for feeding and milking as the radio played music. As soon as each cow was milked, it was released from its stanchion and another cow took its place. This was done until all cows were milked. And they produced a lot of milk. We milked about 50 cows in less than two hours. 

There were actually between 57 and 60 cows in the herd, but after about 9-10 months or so after giving birth a cow’s milk production decreases a lot, so a few of them are “dried up” for about two months until they have their next calf. For the time that I worked there I don’t think we ever milked fewer than 47 cows twice daily.) 

Allie used eight gallon stainless steel milk cans/pots for milking. He had two milking machines on each side of the barn, and there were six cans, all of  which we moved from one cow to next. When nearly full the fresh milk pots weighed between 55 and 70 pounds and that’s when one of us ran it out to the milk house and poured it into a refrigerated 500 gallon stainless steel tank. There were two of these huge tanks. We lifted the pot about four feet and poured the milk into the storage tank without spilling any on the floor. And you didn’t dare drop it. Allie didn’t put up with messes. He might fire you on the spot. He had a crazy temper, and he was emotional and mean when he lost it. That farm was his whole life. 

The Albertine farm was pretty much self-sustaining. They grew most everything they needed. Allie worked on that farm all his life. He was a master of all trades, as opposed to a “jack of all trades, master of none”. Allie could and did design, create, build and or/repair anything and everything on that farm. He was a mechanic, plumber, electrician, welder, carpenter, “midwife” to cows, concrete finisher, veterinarian, artificial inseminator, mason, blacksmith, vendor, painter, and business executive. He managed all the animals. He mowed and baled hay, aerated fields, spread manure fertilizer in fields and did the hay baling. And he was almost deaf from driving that old “Poppin’ Johnny” tractor so much. (A 1940s and 1950s John Deere Tractor with a two-cylinder engine that made a constant and loud “pop-pop” “pop-pop” “pop-pop” “pop-pop” sound. Many a farmer went almost deaf from driving those tractors.) so, whenever I talked to him, I spoke loudly so that he could understand me. He often yelled back at me to stop yelling, but then he wouldn’t hear what I said and yelled, “what?”. I usually only spoke to him when he asked a question. 

Allie was also perhaps the strongest man I have ever known, pound for pound. He stood about five feet nine inches tall, and maybe 160 pounds, but he could lift and move things that a human should not be able to. 

Besides the John Deere tractor, he also had a John Deere hay trailer. That trailer was about 12 feet wide and 24 feet long and had a heavy steel frame with 2x12 plank decking, and a huge wagon tongue. The trailer’s tongue was made of four-inch iron pipe and extended eight feet to the middle and welded to a big steel loop to connect to the tractor or truck hitch. That iron was thick and extremely heavy. That trailer had to weigh a couple of tons, and that tongue was at least 500 pounds of it. 

In my sixteenth summer, I was the head milker and straw boss for that hay season, meaning I got to hire and fire hayfield workers. I didn’t fire any, but Allie did. Also, I was up by 5 a.m., walked to the farm, brought the cows in and began milking by 6 a.m. After milking, we scrubbed the milk house, cleaned the barn, ate a breakfast made by Della and got ready for the hay fields by 9 a.m. Then at 5 p.m. I brought the herd to the barn for the evening milking. Which took about two more hours, plus the cleaning of the milk house and barn. I usually got home by nine p.m. I did this seven days a week. (Mom worried a lot.)

One day, as we were getting ready for the hayfields Allie backed the tractor to within about 2-3 feet from the trailer tongue and called for me to pick up the tongue and put it on the tractor’s trailer hook. I tried but couldn’t even pretend to lift that trailer tongue. He called for two more hay workers to come help me. They were big boys and together we could not budge that 500 lb. tongue. So, Allie jumped down from the tractor, called us “baby wimps”, told us to get out of the way, and proceeded to pick up the trailer tongue, pull the two-ton trailer forward and hooked the tongue to the tractor in one smooth motion all by himself. We stood there in awe. He got back on the tractor, smirked, and yelled, “let’s go”. So, we jumped on the moving trailer.

Another time we were training a young Holstein cow, after her first calf birth, to the milking machine. The cow kept raising a back foot and kicking the cups off, and no milk was coming from her very full udder. This young Holstein cow weighed about 1200 pounds and was almost six feet tall at her hip. Big heavy animal. After she had kicked the cups off about eight or ten times, with Allie constantly trying to soothe her, he got mad and slugged the cow in the hip. That hit moved her about three feet and she almost lost her footing and she bawled loudly. Then Allie calmed down and talked soothingly to her and tried again to put the cups on her. Again, she kicked them off. After another four or five attempts Allie lost his temper and went around the stanchion to face her, and he slugged her right between the eyes. Her legs wobbled and she crumbled, while in the stanchion. Her chin hit the concrete floor and her eyes glazed. He had knocked her out with a single punch. The other milker and I were dumbstruck. We just stood there. When she came to, the young cow was still groggy while attempting to regain her footing. As she stood up Allie put the cups on her again, and she let them stay this time and she gave milk. Boy, did she give milk. Allie teared up and ran out of the barn. As a sixteen year old I never knew how I should react to that incident. It was extremely cruel, yet it worked. (That cow became the best milk producer in the herd. And never kicked the cups off again.) 

Those were two examples of Allies’ strength that I witnessed, and I’m still dumbfounded by both events . 

Whenever a cow calves, it has either a female (heifer) or a bull calf. If the calf was a heifer, Allie would determine whether or not to keep it to be part of the milking herd in the future or to take it to the auction. Most bull calves went directly to auction, but every couple of years he would come home from the auction with a couple of white-face or angus steers (castrated bull calves) to raise as beef for the farm table. 

Whenever Della cooked for the workers, there was always a steak for each worker, and they were delicious. Of course, after working in the hayfields we were hungry. We gobbled up everything she put on the table. 

Putting up hay each summer was a pretty big undertaking. I hired at least eight or nine more guys to work in the hay. Allie drove the tractor and mowed the hay and then baled it, usually in the same day. We picked those bales up off the ground and threw them up onto the hay truck bed or onto the trailer bed. Cables and pullies and hay-hooks raised eight bales at a time of hay into the hayloft. Allie’s GMC pickup was used to pull the cable and hay up to the hayloft. We filled the huge hayloft of the main barn about 30 bales high in the middle and 25 bales long and 25 bales wide and then filled both the lower floor and the hayloft of another large barn about 20 bales high with large rectangular bales of hay. It was hard back-breaking work. I certainly earned my $1.50 per hour pay. 

Sometimes, at the lunch or dinner table, we saw Allie and Della deep in rather quiet conversation, but whenever Allie and Frank talked, they both usually yelled, and would yell at each other to “stop yelling”. Both were hard of hearing but neither admitted it. (In the 1950s I’m not sure there was much to be done about hearing loss.) 

Those two summers that I worked for Allie Albertine I learned and saw a lot of what took place on a dairy farm in the 1950’s. Things have changed a lot since then, some for better and some not. I am forever grateful for that experience; all of it. I think remember most of it, and some I’m sure I’ve already forgotten. 

P.S. 

1. Many years later I found that Albertine’s also paid my social security taxes without deducting anything from my check. 

2. When hearing and understanding conversations became more difficult for me, I learned many of the ramifications of hearing loss. Several times I’ve thought about Allie Albertine’s hearing loss and I realized that almost every condition I used to describe his personality is very often a result of hearing impairment. 

Nez Nesmith 

August 2023