I Was Happiest Farming in New Mexico
I Was Happiest Farming in New Mexico
Copyright 2006 Harris B. McKee
Walter Selvy, my mother’s first cousin, was quite a successful Lawyer in Des Moines. He’d come from a New Mexico ranch to go to Drake University sometime during Mother’s on and off attendance.[1] He’d also graduated in 1928. He practiced in the Polk County Attorney’s office before joining and managing during WWII what became a prestigious Des Moines law firm that in 2006 includes more than 50 attorneys.
We shared Christmas with the Selvys and often saw them on other occasions during the year. Walter was a great story teller and we all enjoyed hearing him recount some of the shenanigans that he had encountered in the County Attorney’s office. They built a new house in Des Moines and even had a color TV at a time when we hadn’t yet received my grandmother’s hand-me-down set. To a Warren County farm boy he seemed successful professionally, socially, and materially.
I had been growing up much like my peers on farms at that time. We all got up every day and did chores before school and more when we came home. From the age of 11 or 12 on, we were expected to put in full days in the field or doing whatever chores might be needed. About the only excuse from summer work allowed was summer-band practice in Indianola but that only occupied part of the morning a few days a week. Even our friends in town expected to have jobs at about the same age and were pleased as teenagers to come out and do farm work for a dollar an hour.
Clearly living on a farm involved a lot of hard work. We ate well but we didn’t have many material things. At the same time, farm incomes during that time were low so my mother was encouraging me to think of other careers than joining my dad on the farm. Law looking attractive and my interest was particularly aroused by the politics that I encountered as one of two representatives to Boys State from our high school. I was elected as Secretary of Agriculture on a plank that called for an advertising fund that would be raised through a check-off from farm product sales. “McKee, the man with a plan” announced my banners. The governor of Iowa, a lawyer, came to speak to us. Law looked like a really good way to get off the farm.
My mother encouraged me to talk to Walter about being a lawyer and the opportunity soon arose. I encountered him in the State Capitol and took the occasion to ask him to tell me what being a lawyer was like. He replied, “I was happiest when I was farming in New Mexico.” Admittedly, I didn’t know much about New Mexico, but I was intimately acquainted with farming in Iowa and I believed our farms were probably better than those in New Mexico. If a successful lawyer had been happier farming in New Mexico, being a lawyer clearly wasn’t a very desirable profession. Walter never knew that his one line response turned me away from a career and I have tried to remember how much we can influence others with comments that are effectively taken in an unknown context.
[1] She “taught” her way through Drake and graduated in 1928. He teaching had led to a position as principal of the school in Missouri Valley, Iowa prior to graduation but she deemed a teaching position in Des Moines preferable to returning to Missouri Valley.