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‘Hardest-working man’ was longtime Forestville farmer

Donald F. Bradigan

My cousin Donald “Donny” Bradigan died peacefully in his sleep at age 80. Not screaming like the two kids on the tailgate of his truck. With apologies to Jack Handey, those two kids were my cousin and best friend Andrew Wilmot and myself. We were about 6 or 7 at this time in the late 1960s, always hanging around the barn and helping him with his endless series of chores. And by helping, I mean creating twice the work for the hardest-working man either of us ever knew. He died on Monday, Jan. 24, but his memory lingers like a Cheshire smile.

That particular day, if memory serves, we were horse-playing and refused to get off the tail gate of his trusty Ford so he could pick up a bale of hay. So he popped the clutch, and sent us flying “asses over teakettle.” We tumbled in a ball of bruised knees and scraped elbows. I’d like to say we learned our lesson, but truthfully I can’t. It was the only time I’ve ever seen him driven to distraction by our antics. He was peaceful and patient, but even a saint has his limits.

The last time I saw him in August, his piercing gray-green eyes were as bright and inquisitive as ever, asking me about my life in California, how were my kids, was I still an editor? He seemed curious about the people who escaped the orbital pull of the family farm, which was his legacy and burden, pride and inheritance, keeper of the flame as the fourth generation of Bradigans in the farming business — first potatoes and then dairy. As far as we knew, the first Bradigans came from Westphalia in what is now Germany after the reactionary forces to the revolutions of 1848 chased off the incorrible Bonapartists.

Land was cheap in the Chautauqua country (we call it country and not county because of our local pride), and the Bradigans flourished after their own fashion. Over the years, the hundreds of acres gradually accumulated were leased out or reverted to the old hardwood forests, where the occasional beams of sunlight would break through to show you the dust of chittering squirrels hard at work on their hickory nuts and acorns. By the time he entered his 70s, he was down to about the 88 acres closest to the house — the last major project was harvesting the climax forest stand of red oak and other hardwoods behind the barn.

His father Rich was the youngest of his generation of nine children, which included my father, Floyd John Bradigan, and Donnie was the youngest of his own, along with his brother Richard (“Dickie”) and his sister Linda.

I remember this past summer’s visit he pulled the sweat-salt crusted brim of his baseball cap over his brow, happy for a few moments away from the endless list of chores that began back in the mid-1940s and never ended until my cousin Andy found him hunched over in a chair at the kitchen table, wrapped in a woolen shawl. His sister Linda had asked Andy, who lives directly across Walnut Creek Road, to check on him as he had been feeling poorly. He was actually my first cousin once removed (if you are a Bradigan, you become fluent in the language of cousins. Donny was my dad’s cousin, which made that generational difference the “once removed.”)

He lived a life of routines — waking in the cold dark to set up the milking machines, eating some eggs and bacon and cold whole milk, then endless runs back and forth to check on the hayfields of clover, timothy, alfalfa and rye grasses, the field corn, some 40 acres of Concords and Fredonias, turning wrenches on the row of field implements and tractors, pulling hay from the mow for his several dozen Holsteins. Always something needed his attention. Somewhere in there he also worked night shifts at the steel mill, still rising early to tend to his land. He never married, though he was a handsome man with chiseled cheeks and he was wiry and strong. He’d of made a good husband for a lucky woman but he was shy and of that type of bachelor farmer once common in farm towns like Forestville – anyone who has seen the compelling 1992 documentary by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, “Brother’s Keeper,” will know what I’m talking about.

Most of my memories of cousin Donny involved the endless hay crops; in a good year you might get three or even four harvests, in a bad year, you’d be lucky to get one. Too much rain the forage sours, too little it’s as brittle as the straw it would become. It was hard, heavy work bringing in the hay – and cousin Donny didn’t rely on anyone. You’d see him across the road painstakingly unloading the 80-pound bales from the truck bed onto the ancient rattling hay elevator with its big cloth-rubber belt that dropped them onto the second-story mow. Once he dropped a few dozen, he’d clamber up the stairs to stack them from back to front, where they’d keep the cows fed through the harsh winters. In later years he’d sell those bales for about half of what they should of been worth.

Maybe 20 years ago on one of my periodic visits he was complaining to me that he only made $10,000 the prior year. What, $10,000? Even then that seemed an impossible sum on which to get by. I asked how? “Well, after I sent my mother (my own aunt Pauline, who deserves her own book) to Florida for two weeks, bought a new baler, a new pickup, and paid off half of a new John Deere, that’s all I had left,” he said ruefully. I don’t know about you, but if it weren’t for equity in my house, I’d never clear $10,000 in a year. At the time in the mid-1990s, the milk production of a dairy cow on good pasturage was about $2,200 per year — the same as it was in the mid-1970s. The advent of corporate conglomerates made it impossible for a small family farm to match those economies of scale and he wisely drew down his herd where he could, until about eight or 10 years ago, all he had left was a few heifers for replacement cows. Even those were gone by his final years until all he had was timber and hay.

We each in our own way shout into the well of eternity, hoping for an echo. I guess this is the echo for my cousin Donny. I just thought you should know. He was a good, decent man and I will miss him.

Bret Bradigan is the editor and publisher of the Ojai Quarterly & Ojai Monthly in California. He also produces a weekly podcast, “Ojai: Talk of the Town.”

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