Aunt Happy

“Many of my childhood memories are connected to spending time on either the Kubik or Haight grandparents’ family farms. When my Grandfather Lyman Haight retired, we moved out to the farm in the Carico Hills near Ritzville, Washington. The first purchase my father made was of a pregnant mare with a colt at side for my elder sister and me. We trained that mare and her colts and spent much of our time riding. We were quickly involved in a 4-H Horse Club and then the Ritzville 4-H Livestock club. My first livestock project was a shorthorn steer that I raised and sold on my birthday at the Spokane Junior Livestock Show.  I remember leading my pet steer into the sales ring with tears streaming down my face. I don’t think I realized until that point that my pet was actually going away. The only saving grace – the buyers felt bad for that little crying girl and my Dad couldn’t believe the price I got!

I married a farmer, my high school sweetheart, and we raised cattle, wheat, beans and children, both ours and foster boys, on the Hardt family farm out between Odessa and Ritzville. Our children grew up with livestock and horses and helped us develop the Ritzville Rodeo. I have to admit I was a bit jealous when our youngest daughter was able to become very involved with FFA in high school – it was a male-only organization in my day!

Later in life, when I was administrator of the hospital district in Ritzville, I used to preface my testimony before the Legislature – and even later Congress – with “as a farm wife from Eastern Washington, this is how what you are proposing will affect my fellow farm neighbors…” It’s always been important to me to teach legislators and government folks about farm life. Representatives from the west side of our state and Congressmen from the East Coast often have no concept of the distances we deal with in Eastern Washington. One memorable experience was taking a new state EMS director on a helicopter tour of the hospitals in eastern Washington, meeting with local ambulance crews along the way. He kept asking as we flew over wheat fields, “do your ambulances really come out this far?” The best part was when we were forced by a snowstorm to put down near Pullman and he realized that farmers needed more than a helicopter strategically placed (which was a federal proposal being suggested at the time to replace rural hospitals and ambulances.)

In our retirement, we have traveled throughout the lower 48 states in our RV named Auntie Violet, for the past ten years.  As we drive, we try to figure out what the various crops we see are. All over this vast country, we see farmers and their families at work, feeding us – and the rest of the world.”