MY STORY  and
 SUPPLEMENT to AUGUST FRIEDRICH ADOLPH GODT

by Lois Winchell
by Paul William Godt

My father, Florenz William Godt, son of August Godt, and my mother, Irene Anna Hetlage, who lived near Wright City, Missouri were married May 1, 1937.  Her father came from the province of Hanover, Germany. My parents lived in the house on the Godt family farm three miles north of Wright City where my grandparents, August and Wilhelmine, had lived.  The house was wooden frame construction with two stories and a cellar under part of it.  I was born November 12, 1938.  My memory of Grandpa and Grandma is when they were living with Dad’s sister, Aunt Clara, in Wright City.  Aunt Clara lived next door to Dad’s sister, Aunt Lorena, Uncle Clarence and Lois Feix.  The exterior of both houses was brick and both houses had the same dimensions, but one was a mirror image of the other.  I remember Aunt Clara and Lorena reading letters from relatives in Germany during the early 1940’s but the letters stopped sometime during World War II.  Aunt Lorena was the one who diligently recorded family history and identified family pictures.

Indian Camp Creek ran through our farm and the farm where Dad’s brother, Uncle Henry, Aunt Carrie, and Doris lived.  Their farm joined ours on the west.  The creek was an important feature of both farms. We had to cross the creek to get to our house and Uncle Henry didn’t.  Sometimes we could not cross the creek with a car and less frequently it would flood the creek bottom land of both farms.  I remember one year Dad lost most of his wheat crop after it was cut with a binder, shocked and ready for thrashing.  Also, I remember being sick and Dad riding a horse across the creek to get medicine.  I think Uncle Henry met him on the other side of the creek with a car or his old pickup truck.

Both farms had good creek bottom land usually planted with corn or wheat.  Sometime we grew oats on higher ground.  The road to our house went down a steep hill then crossed the creek and through the creek bottom.  The house was on higher rolling land also used for cattle and hog pasture.  We had beef cattle, a milk cow, hogs, chickens, a team of horses and sometimes a team of mules.  The corn, wheat and oats were normally used to feed the animals.  We rarely sold grain.  The main income came from selling cattle and hogs.  We also sold eggs and a little butter.  Dad and Uncle Henry did a lot of farm work together.  We had a tractor and feed grinder for corn and wheat.  Uncle Henry would bring his corn and wheat in a box wagon pulled by a team of horses to our place to be ground.  Our tractor was used for plowing and disking the ground on both farms.  Horses were used for planting both corn and wheat.  Harvey Washington and Richard ‘Dick’ Owens, both black men worked for my Dad and Uncle Henry.  Harvey drove the horses and worked most every day.  Dick drove the tractor and worked a lot but not every day.  Neither man could read or write, but Dick was very good with numbers. There was a wagon road between the farms that crossed the creek.  To get to Uncle Henry’s house after crossing the creek the wagon road went up a steep hill.  I am sure most of the trips we made to Uncle Henry’s were either in a wagon or walking.

The house we lived in was heated with wood and the cook stove burned wood.  The cook stove was later replaced with a combination propane gas and wood stove.  There was a wood box for the kitchen stove that was filled from outside.  There was no running water and there was an outside toilet.  We had a hand pump in the kitchen with water supplied from a cistern.  Also, we had a summer house with a screen porch used for most everything except sleeping in the summer.  We got electricity in 1949.  The neighbors had electricity a few weeks before we did because our house was not wired properly.  Uncle Clarence Feix corrected the wiring problems.  I clearly remember turning on the kitchen light for the first time.  Before we had electricity we used kerosene lamps and had a kerosene refrigerator.  , Dad used a lantern when he did chores at night before the barns had electric light.  We had a smokehouse for smoking sausage and hams.  There was a salt box inside the smoke house for curing pork.  Each year we butchered two hogs.  The wash machine was run by a gasoline motor before we replaced it with an electric wash machine.

Each neighbor depended on and helped their neighbors.  The neighbors who did the most with my Dad and Uncle Henry were Manuel Klausmeier and August Niemann.  They would butcher, cut fire wood, sharpen wooden fence posts, shred corn, and put-up hay together.  The shredder would shuck the corn and blow the fodder in the cow barn loft.  The women would usually come and prepare food.  Often we had lunch in the morning, a big noon meal and lunch in the afternoon. Some lunch sandwiches had smoked pork summer sausage and apple butter.  One summer, about 1950, my dad could not work because he was ill.  The neighbors came and did everything that needed to be done.  They would hitch up the horses and knew where everything was.  Thrashing wheat was the big event of the year and involved several more neighbors.  Dad and Dick usually ran the thrashing machine.  Other neighbors that helped were Herman Godt, Jess Bruning, Harold Niemann, Herman Niemann, Ed Schemmer, Alfred Miller, Emil Miller and Clarence Schaper.  Also, Aunt Clara, Aunt Lorena and Lois would come and help when the thrashing crew was at our or Uncle Henry’s place. The thrash machine was powered by a tractor and blew the straw in a big pile.  The grain and wheat bundles were hauled with horses and wagons. Roland Niemann, Lois and I would ride an empty wagon to the wheat field to take water to the pitchers who loaded the wheat bundles on the wagon.  When thrashing was over all would gather for an evening of eating, drinking and playing pinochle.  Aunt Carrie had a game called Big Apple.  Doris, Lois and I played it and played it.

In 1952 we moved to a place just south of Wright City that had a small pasture, barn and chicken house.  Within a year or so Uncle Henry and Aunt Carrie moved to Wright City.  I finished high school in 1956 and graduated from Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy in 1961 with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering.  I went to work at McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis County where I was a co-op student while going to college.  Here I worked in the Space Simulation and Systems Laboratory, and the Instrumentation and Standards Laboratory.  On June 5, 1965 Shirley Mitchell and I were married.  The minister talked separately with each of us before the wedding.  He said I had a good catch and was fortunate to find someone with both a teaching and medical background.  A son, Jonathan, and daughter, Jennifer, were born on October 4, 1967 and April 17, 1969, respectively.  I joined a land surveying and engineering business with two partners in 1971 and worked long hours.  This was a difficult time particularly for my family.  I went to work for Union Electric, the main electric utility in the St. Louis, Missouri area in 1978; and worked in The Quality Assurance Department at Callaway nuclear power plant until retiring in 1999.