“The wonder of growing up
on Windgalore Farm”

Herm Botzow
on WSKG Radio’s OFF THE PAGE

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Originally broadcast May 31 at 1 & 7pm

“Gampy says be alert, recognize when an adventure is occurring, and be part of the adventure. And give it your all, for it will never come again.”

--from “Windgalore Farm”

There is still fascination with farming life – witness the value people place on institutions like the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown. If we search far enough, most of us can trace our family history back to a farm somewhere. But there is a great difference between “rural” and “agricultural”. In 1935 there were 6.8 million farms in the United States, today there are about two million.

Herm Botzow needs only to remember his childhood. His parents, Hermann and Sally, bought a farm in 1938, when Herm was a baby. His youth was spent there and the recollections in his new book “Windgalore Farm” (written under the pen name Dave Williams) tells of a healthy, prosperous environment and a life filled with everyday adventure. It is also an album of family and friends, of the young and old in his life and of life in a setting that now seems fragile.

Herm grew up on Windgalore Farm in Hinckley, Ohio and lives today in Gilbertsville, NY, in Otsego County, where he raises beef cattle. In between he spent many years as a civil engineer in New York City, working for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Retiring to a farm in 1993 it was easy to recall the newborn calves and newly-arrived chickens of years ago, and how difficult it was for his family to deal in both milk and eggs. But Herm also knows about the pleasures of making maple syrup and the strain of shoveling manure. There were endless possibilities for childhood pranks (hiding a dead snake under a refrigerator seems to have been an especially delightful recollection). There were also excellent learning opportunities – driving the farm tractor was a transition from the bicycle to the automobile.

Herm also remembers affectionately a wonderful cast of characters, from Gladys, the phone operator who responded when you turned the crank on the telephone to Mr. Gumpter, who repainted his license plates every year, to the local constable who sold dynamite on the side. Herm also had lots of farm friends his own age, especially Dave Williams. The nom de plume on the cover of “Windgalore Farm” is a real person with whom Herm would go bicycle riding (till a tractor ran over the bike), sleigh riding in winter and deal with the farm chores that got more demanding as they grew older. By telling his personal story from Dave’s point of view, Herm Botzow is able to take a step back and observe both the happy and trying times.

“Windgalore Farm” describes a kind of youth and lifestyle that has not disappeared but is shared by fewer people (only 27% of the members of Future Farmers of America now live in rural areas).

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