Still can't milk a cow

I’ve tried a number of times to milk cows. No luck. Rather, no milk.

I was making my first trip down to southern Idaho to court my wife. It was a 550-mile overnight drive from Potlatch, Idaho, where I worked, to Buhl, Idaho, where my future wife Dorothy lived on a farm. I left at 5 p.m. and arrived at milking time.

I was born on a farm and lived my first six years out in the country. Just one cow, and my dad did the milking.

Anyhow, I was directed out to the barn where Dorothy and her brother Bob were in the process of milking 27 cows. I watched with fascination and was invited to milk one of the cows. No luck. Even with directions, I could not get milk flowing. I was cursed by a cow and still to this day I cannot get a cow to provide me a few drops of milk.

The two of them were amused. I wasn’t, and still carry a dislike of cows.

I learned that Dorothy and Bob did this twice a day, early in the morning (5 a.m.) and (5 p.m.) in the evening.

But I learned that day that when you enter a barn you need to be very careful where you step.

On many future visits, it seemed that I always ended up in the barn.

Bob named his cows and would bring in the first batch and fill up the stantion area and then repeat the process until all the cows entered and were milked. I eventually got the elemental task of putting a scoop of grain before each cow. I wouldn’t say that I hated cows, but no one there knew what I was thinking.

Now that I had been furnished with rubber boots, I started with the scoop shovel and helped them clean the barn. I preferred this to trying to learn to milk.

Early on, they had old-fashioned milk machines and ended up finishing each cow milking by hand. No refrigeration. They put the milk in large cans and sunk them in the water ditch to keep the milk cool until it was picked up. I remember when they installed refrigeration and the new milking machines. It cut milking time by nearly half.

That wasn’t the end of my milking woes. Later, after we married, we moved to Othello. Here I had made friends with a farmer who wanted to go on vacation for a week. He asked me to feed his hogs and milk his cow. I made the mistake of agreeing to do so.

When I went out the first time to try to do the milking, I could see a young calf in the pen, so I turned it in with the cow.

After the farmer friend returned, he asked if I had any troubles. I never did tell him about using the calf to do my milking.

Over a lot of years, I returned to Dorothy’s family farm. I had no desire to try to learn a milking skill.

To this day the only time I want to see a cow is in a pasture.