Daddy Could Make or Mend Anything

Dad was born Floyd Raymond Guild on December 15, 1904, in St. Mathias, Minnesota, County of Crow Wing, to Dan W. Guild and Olive A. Wooster. (Some family documents state he was born in Fort Ripley, Minnesota. In any case, both towns are near Brainerd, Minnesota where most family members have always said he was from anyway.) He had ten brothers and sisters. (Some were half-brothers and sisters as his father was married twice.) He worked at John Deere Plow Works in Moline for thirty-nine years, and retired in 1965. He held a number of positions at the plant, but was a hot press operator on the plow share line when he retired. They called him “Casey” at work. He arrived at work a half-hour early everyday so he could get the same parking space close to the building where he worked. Mom packed his lunch in a black lunch bucket with a thermos. He would take six sandwiches, and eat three at his break and three at lunch. He loved to take fried egg sandwiches. Daddy’s whole life was devoted to his family and providing for us. There wasn’t much recreation for him. Life was tough for a man whose entire being was consumed by the daily demands of work and worrying about providing for such a large family. I’m happy I wrote my memories down, for I now feel connected to Daddy in a new, loving way and appreciate, for the first time, how really hard he did work to provide for us. Daddy was a horse trader. He had a good friend, Hugh Chase, and they were always trading things back and forth. If he needed a tool or other equipment he would trade for it. Once he needed a chain saw to cut down a tree in the front yard. He traded something for a broken one, fixed it, used it to cut down the tree and then resold it at a profit. Oh, how he boasted about that deal. I talked to Herb Spahn, another of Daddy’s friends, on a recent trip home and he told me what a good inventor Dad was. He could make anything he needed. One of his inventions was a riding-sprayer to spray the fruit trees in our orchard. (What has all that DDT he used to spray done to our respiratory systems?) He also made a motorized plow to plow our garden. Herb said he helped all the neighbors plow their fields with it, and was very proud of it. Another anecdote Herb relayed to me was about one of the times when several of the neighborhood guys were going to our house to see something Daddy had made. As they entered our yard Daddy said, “Now, no cussin’ you guys, I’ve got five girls here.” He was always very protective of us. Daddy was also mechanically minded—a jack-of-all-trades. If something was broken and needed repairing, he could actually make the parts needed to fix it. He had all the hand and power tools necessary to do both metal and woodworking. He kept our old cars running, did the electrical work and any plumbing that needed to be done. He was a superb carpenter. We never hired anyone to do anything. Daddy did it all. He was also an excellent carver. He carved shotgun handles out of walnut and finished the wood by staining it with homemade stain he made from walnut husks. He was very familiar with walnut and its unique characteristics as his father owned and operated a commercial walnut grove. Daddy’s three sisters from Brainerd, Minnesota, came to visit us one summer. Their names were Edith Larson, Myrtle Dilly, and Gertrude Jones. Now, you have to remember we didn’t visit back and forth with our relatives very often in the Forties. With seven kids you just didn’t go traveling much, so I had never met them before. As I recall, they seemed eccentric and outspoken and their dress was what I would call outlandish. Daddy told us all to be very careful what we said and did while they were visiting because he thought they would think we were rich and they would want to stay with us forever. (Believe me, we were not rich, so just what must their circumstances in Minnesota have been!) They were the only relatives of Dad’s I met except for Uncle Clarence, his wife, Francis, and their five children. They came to visit a few times in the years just before Daddy got sick and passed away. I did get to know them pretty well. Cigarettes were hard to come by during World War II. Most of them were shipped overseas to the GI’s. But there was plenty of loose-cut tobacco so everyone rolled their own cigarettes. I can still picture Dad putting tobacco on thin cigarette paper, rolling it all together, twisting the ends and lighting up. At one time, Daddy had a little machine that rolled the cigarettes. We were delighted when Daddy blew smoke rings for us. (Little was known then about the dangers of smoking.) In later years, he quit smoking, but chewed tobacco. I can still see him spitting! Daddy would take Bernie and Bobby hunting for rabbits and squirrels for us to eat. They would bring them home, nail them to a post in the backyard and skin them. It was very impressive to a small child. He had a shed in the backyard where he retreated most evenings. He had a workbench, lots of tools, a radio, and a heater to keep himself warm in the winter. We used this shed to play house in after he moved his workshop into the new garage.