Building Personal Histories With AI Examples

00:00:00 [Marilyn Baker]
Then they had a cream separator in there. Wouldn't that be…

00:00:17 [David Baker]
That was an older one than what we had in our milk house.

00:00:24 [Bryan Baker]
So you'd dump the milk into that and it would separate?

00:00:27 [Marilyn Baker]
Uh-huh, separate the cream from the milk.

00:00:30 [David Baker]
I spun it. Had a handle on it that took and turned.

00:00:35 [Marilyn Baker]
Yeah, I remember seeing that after we were married and I went up there and this little old cabin building that they had right behind the house there is where that was.

00:00:49 [David Baker]
Yeah. That's where we made the cream.

00:00:58 [Marilyn Baker]
But with Grandpa, you know, this was before all the milk that was sent to the creamery in the factory and stuff like that. It had to be A1 dairy. So at that time, Grandpa wasn't able to send it anymore. But up till then, you know, he had, well, and for our personal use, too, he just had the milk can there. Of course, he milked the cows in a bucket. Then when he got the bucket full, he just had this metal thing that fit down on the milk can with, what do you call that? A little disc in there that filtered. Yeah, made sure that it was just milk and not anything other, any dirt or anything. Like that coming in.

00:01:51 [David Baker]
Filter all the dingleberries out.

00:01:53 [Marilyn Baker]
Yeah. Grandpa was always really pretty clean about trying to get his milk cows cleaned off there, you know. But, yeah, they poured down through that, and that would kind of filter all of that out. And then he, well, he just brought a bucket of it into the house, and Grandma put it into bottles. And then as it sat in the, In the fridge, the cream would rise to the top. That's how we got our cream when she wanted. She'd just skim off some of that and put it in a little cream pitcher for their cream for their coffee, whatever cream they were going to use on the table or to cook with, you know. That's how they did it. The other milk was using that cart that Grandpa used to put his cans on to carry out to the street.

00:02:51 [David Baker]
Yeah.

00:03:02 [Bryan Baker]
I remember milking the cows or, you know, pretending to. Or squirting a couple. Yeah. When you say he was pretty clean, what was it?

00:03:23 [Marilyn Baker]
Washing off the udders.

00:03:25 [Bryan Baker]
I remember him taking some, it seemed like it was a lubricant or something.

00:03:32 [Marilyn Baker]
And rubbing around on the tits before you milked them?

00:03:35 [Bryan Baker]
Seems like that.

00:03:36 [Marilyn Baker]
Unless they, you know, I guess he had, but I'm thinking that he put that on there after he milked. If they, in cold weather, that wouldn't happen. You know, it was just cold weather. If they were kind of, had gotten wet and then gotten chappy or was tending to want to crack or something like that, I think he had put that salve on there.

00:03:58 [David Baker]
They wash the udder and the teats with water. Then dry them as good as you can.

00:04:07 [Marilyn Baker]
I'm sure that's why you're thinking.

00:04:12 [Bryan Baker]
How many cows did you have?

00:04:17 [David Baker]
We probably milked three or four consistently. I had one. My dad would have two or three.

00:04:26 [Marilyn Baker]
When you sent your Your extra milk to the dairy, too.

00:04:30 [David Baker]
Yeah.

00:04:31 [Bryan Baker]
Was that pretty typical in your neighborhood? Most of the families had a couple milk cows?

00:04:46 [Marilyn Baker]
Most of the families that milked cows had quite a few cows. 30, 40 of them. Like Coleman's. And Mathers across the street.

00:05:01 [David Baker]
Yeah, they'd have 20 or 30.

00:05:04 [Marilyn Baker]
I remember them two. Them two families.

00:05:09 [David Baker]
They used milkers. Surge milkers. DeLaval milkers.

00:05:16 [Bryan Baker]
What are they?

00:05:18 [Marilyn Baker]
Just suction cups. Sucks the milk out of them.

00:05:24 [Bryan Baker]
So they had those automatic back then too? Yeah.

00:05:28 [Marilyn Baker]
They weren't like they are now where you can bring them up into a milking parlor and they go around this thing and the milkers come down. You had to put them on and then they were hooked up, you know.

00:05:41 [Bryan Baker]
Hooked to what?

00:05:42 [Marilyn Baker]
What were they hooked to?

00:05:45 [David Baker]
They'd have a pipe that goes around to all of the stations with valves that you cooked these milkers up, too.

00:05:55 [Marilyn Baker]
Oh, yes. I'm remembering Carl Rasmussen had them.

00:05:59 [Bryan Baker]
Yeah. How are they? How did they run? Was it electric?

00:06:09 [Marilyn Baker]
Well, it probably was. We had electricity back then when we were little. Haha. I don't know, was it electric or some kind of a? I don't know. Some kind of gas? I don't know. But I do remember the air. Now these milkers may have run just on air.

00:06:36 [David Baker]
That was the Air Force through. When you turn that spigot on, that you plug your milkers into, when you turn that spigot on, it just sprays air out from it. Put it in force. There's a mechanism on those milkers that probably wasn't electrical at all. It's just all air pressure. That would cause one side of the A cow's got four teats, left and right. And the ones on the right side would trigger, and then when that one let up, the other side would trigger and dump them that way.

00:07:38 [Marilyn Baker]
Well, I don't remember too much about that. I just remember Carl Rasmussen having them.

00:07:45 [David Baker]
Yeah, there wasn't anything electrical about them at all. 

00:07:49 [Bryan Baker]
How many cows did Grandpa have?

00:07:52 [Marilyn Baker]
He never had very many either. Maybe like.

00:07:56 [David Baker]
Probably three at the most. I milked him for.

00:08:01 [Marilyn Baker]
Maybe four.

00:08:03 [David Baker]
A few months.

00:08:04 [Marilyn Baker]
Did you?

00:08:05 [David Baker]
Yeah. 

00:08:08 [Marilyn Baker]
Yeah, you did. I remember.

00:08:09 [Marilyn Baker]
I usually had them milked by the time he got off work.

00:08:14 [Bryan Baker]
When was that? What were you doing at that time?

00:08:17 [Marilyn Baker]
That's when I got out of the service. We actually lived there on Fifth North in Grandpa's house for two or three months.

00:08:32 [Marilyn Baker]
And then we went up and lived in that basement apartment of Grandma and Grandpa Dunn's.

00:08:38 [David Baker]
I got a job up to the university, and then we were able to move. Where we moved to was to Grandpa's house.

00:08:50 [Bryan Baker]
Where did you stay at Grandpa's house? With Scott and Mort?

00:08:58 [David Baker]
We stayed on the porch.

00:09:00 [Marilyn Baker]
We had, let me see. We just had Scott. He was a baby. And so he slept. I think Glenn was still in the Army. Then when he got out, he moved to Salt Lake to go to the University of Utah. So he wasn't there. So there was Keith. And so Ez went upstairs. And so there was Keith and Ez upstairs.

00:09:36 [Bryan Baker]
Ez went upstairs from where?

00:09:40 [Marilyn Baker]
There was a little cot in Grandma and Grandpa's bedroom. Still in Grandma and Grandpa's bedroom. 

00:09:45 [Bryan Baker]
And how old would he have been at that time?

00:09:49 [Marilyn Baker]
Maybe 10.

00:09:51 [Bryan Baker]
10?

00:09:52 [Marilyn Baker]
Mm-hmm.

00:09:55 [Bryan Baker]
So he slept on a cot in Grandpa's little room until he was 10 years old. And then when you guys came, he moved up. 

00:10:11 [Marilyn Baker]
Because by then, Arlene and Wyoma had actually moved to Salt Lake, so they weren't there.

00:10:21 [Bryan Baker]
How old were they?

00:10:24 [Marilyn Baker]
Out of high school. Arlene had a job with Sears. Wyoma went down and she got a job at the church offices down there.

00:10:41 [David Baker]
So she was probably 18?

00:10:44 [Marilyn Baker]
Mm-hmm. Arlene just transferred from the Sears in Logan down to the one in Salt Lake. And Wyoming went down with her, and she got a job right away. And they had a little apartment up there kind of right in the middle of town, wasn't it?

00:11:04 [David Baker]
Uh-huh.

00:11:06 [Marilyn Baker]
Mm-hmm.

00:11:08 [Bryan Baker]
Stayed on the porch where you and Wyoma used to sleep?

00:11:14 [Marilyn Baker]
Mm-hmm. Me and Arlene used to sleep there.

00:11:18 [David Baker]
Oh, where did Wyoma sleep?

00:11:20 [Marilyn Baker]
She slept upstairs. There was Keith and Glenn in a double bed and her in a little single bed upstairs. And Grandma and Grandpa and Ez in a little cot. And then in the winter, Arlene and I, we went in the living room on a make-out bed.

00:11:44 [Bryan Baker]
And the porch was, was it that whole area where the bathroom and that other room is now? Mm-hmm. So the porch was fairly good size. Was it like a wooden?

00:11:55 [Marilyn Baker]
It's cement. It had a cement floor in it. And, you know, up halfway was wood and then screened in. It was screened in all the way around. They packed all of us kids in there when they first bought that. We'd been living up at Grandma Eames'. That was at the time during half of my fourth grade and all of my fifth grade. We'd been living up at Grandma Eames'. Just right after Ez was born. And then they bought that house and moved down there. Grandma, she always says that they bought that house because of the barn, because Grandpa wanted to have cows.

00:12:52 [David Baker]
The barn was better than the house.

00:12:55 [Marilyn Baker]
Well, it was. It didn't have any indoor. It did have the sink with hot and cold water at the sink, but there was no plumbing. The water from that sink just shot out to the, onto the ground next to the house in that pasture area. There was no toilet in there. We had to go to the half miler. They didn't put that in until after your dad and I were married. And away from there.

00:13:24 [Bryan Baker]
So did you help him with building that? 

[David Baker]: No, he hired a contractor.

00:13:39 [Bryan Baker]
So somebody drew up the plans and built the bathroom and the bedroom there?

00:13:48 [Marilyn Baker]
Somebody did that.

00:13:51 [David Baker]
He probably shared work with them.

00:13:56 [Marilyn Baker]
I'm sure he did. Grandpa could have done all the plumbing, you know. I'm not sure how they worked that out.

00:14:04 [Bryan Baker]
Did they eventually put plumbing in the kitchen? Or did it always just go up?

00:14:12 [Marilyn Baker]
No, when they put that bathroom in, it came underneath the house somewhere. So they did hook onto the sewer at that time. It came underneath the kitchen sink and along that way by the cellar door where it opened and stuff like that, and into that little bathroom. And then they cut across for the, I mean, that little bedroom. And all of that was cement floor. Like I told you, that screening porch was cement floor. So they had to dig up that.

00:15:08 [David Baker]
On the east side of the house, just past the sidewalk, they put a trench that went to the street for the sewer. And they drove a pipe, I guess a two-inch pipe, sewer pipe, all the way under the house, into that trench. And then hooked the bathroom and whatever onto it. So you got a sewer pipe, and of course, the culinary water was already in there.

00:15:51 [Marilyn Baker]
Yeah, we had, you know, we at that time we moved in there, there wasn't gas in the valley, so they cooked with wood stoves. Burned wood and coal.

00:16:08 [Bryan Baker]
Where did you get the wood?

00:16:10 [Marilyn Baker]
I don't remember. Grandpa would have coal brought there, you know, big lumps of coal. As far as the wood, I don't remember that. He had, you know, we had to know somebody because right on the other side of that, on the north side of that, where it was a screened-in porch, they had a little what they called a coal bin, you know, where they put the coal. So, anyway, I don't remember. I'm sure that Grandpa knew of somebody that brought wood there. They went and got wood.

00:16:52 [Bryan Baker]
You don't remember the boys going and getting it or Grandpa going and somebody brought it?

00:17:01 [Marilyn Baker]
Mm-mm. He must have had somebody bring it there.

00:17:06 [Bryan Baker]
So did you just, did they, was it mostly coal or?

00:17:12 [Marilyn Baker]
No, you know, they would.

00:17:14 [Bryan Baker]
Every day?


00:17:16 [Marilyn Baker]
It was mostly wood is what they used, but in the living room there, you remember where that little gas heater was? Okay, that, there was chimney right there. And so there was Grandma had a chair in front of the chimney this way. Well, that's where our little heater stove was when we first moved down there. And so in that at night, they'd put this big lump of coal in the winter. Of course, we didn't have to do that in the summertime. In the summertime, though, because she just had her cook stove and everything was still, she didn't have the electric one at that time. It was that, so you know, when she cooked a meal, it heated up the kitchen. And she would get, you know, some paper, put it in there with, usually it was just, they would cut up strips of wood and put it in, and then a few little pieces of coal. Most of the coal was in those big lumps that they used in that little heater in the living room for the winter. They just used little pieces like that to start their fire for her to cook with.

00:18:51 [Bryan Baker]
So she'd have to do that for her. Did she do it for breakfast?

00:18:56 [Marilyn Baker]
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And lunch and supper.

00:19:03 [Bryan Baker]
So you usually cook something for all three meals?

00:19:06 [Marilyn Baker]
Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

Here’s a short historical-based story drawn from Marilyn’s vivid memories of growing up in the early 1940s, centered around her family’s home life, the rhythms of the milk house, and the warmth of coal stoves and screened porches.

A House With a Barn

Marilyn was ten when her family bought the house, but everyone said they really bought the barn.

The house itself had no bathroom, no toilet, no plumbing to speak of. The kitchen sink emptied straight into the dirt on the east side, where someone had slapped a trench halfheartedly into the grass. But the barn — the barn was solid. Grandpa said it was “a working man’s barn,” and he meant it. It meant he could keep cows. And cows meant milk. And milk meant cream. And cream meant something good with coffee, or biscuits, or for rubbing onto cracked knuckles in the winter.

The milk house sat just behind the barn, a rough cabin where Grandpa used a cream separator with a crank and a rhythm. Marilyn spun it sometimes, when her arms were up to the task. The milk poured in from the bucket, filtered through a tin disk that caught whatever floated — dust, hair, dingleberries. “Filter out the world,” Grandpa would say, laughing quietly.

Every morning started with cold fingers on cold udders, a wipe with warm water, and a dab of salve if the cow looked uncomfortable. There were only three or four cows, not the herds the Colemans or the Mathers had across the way. Those folks had real milking parlors with DeLaval suction rigs and piped-in air systems. Marilyn’s family had buckets and shoulders and discipline.

Back at the house, the cream would rise in the glass bottles in the icebox, and Grandma would skim it off with the kind of practiced grace that made it look easy. They used every part. Nothing was wasted.

The porch — screened-in and concrete-floored — was packed tight with kids at night. Marilyn and her sister Arlene slept out there in the summers, the breeze sifting through the mesh and curling up under their thin blankets. It was better than the living room couch-bed they used in the winters, where they’d light a coal stove to keep from freezing. Marilyn didn’t know where the wood came from. Someone brought it, or Grandpa bartered for it. But she remembered the big lumps of coal — black and craggy — burning slow in the corner of the room.

Grandma cooked three meals a day on the wood stove. Paper, then twigs, then slivers of coal. The fire took time, and she lit it each morning like a ritual. Breakfast was hot. Lunch was hot. Supper was hot. Heat came from labor. So did flavor.

Ez slept in a cot in Grandma and Grandpa’s bedroom until he was ten. The girls eventually moved to Salt Lake, got jobs in the city, and left the crowded porch behind. But Marilyn remembered all of it — the milk house, the porch, the bucket filters, the damp mornings.

They bought the house for the barn. But the house — full of noise and steam and churned cream — turned out to be just as good.

a kitchen painted pink

We bought the house
but it came with a barn.
Grandpa saw rafters,
saw cows in the yard.
Three stood waiting
in the morning hush,
warm milk in buckets,
a steam, a rush.
No one spoke poetry,
but there was rhythm in the pail—
tin disk catching flecks,
cream split from the tale.

Grandma lit the fire
like she knew its name.
Paper, twig, coal—
the order was the same.

And the cream rose up,
like it always knew.
the order was the same.

And the cream rose up,
like it always knew.
A slow quiet bloom
in a kitchen painted pink
the smells, the heat,
the bread in a drawer
and coal at your feet.

The porch was our room
in the summer of air.
Concrete dreams
and Ar-leen’s hair.
Blankets thin,
nights loud with bugs,
stars through the screen
like polka dot rugs.

And the cream rose up,
like it always knew.
A slow quiet bloom
in a kitchen painted pink
the smells, the heat,
the bread in a drawer
and coal at your feet.

The coal stove moaned
in the winter months,
and the couch unfolded
with a grown-up grunt.
No plumbing, just a sink,
and a trench out back,
where the water wandered
and never looked back.

Ez slept in their room
till he outgrew the cot.
No one complained.
They used what they got.
The barn fed the morning,
but the house was the thread—
pie on the windowsill,
stories before bed.

Let the cream rise slow,
let the cows stay near.
Don’t stir too fast
or it all goes clear.
We didn’t write poems,
but we lived them long—
with warm milk hands
and a barn full of song.

And the cream rose up,
like it always knew.
A slow quiet bloom
in a kitchen painted pink
the smells, the heat,
the bread in a drawer
and coal at your feet.

Grandpa bought the barn,
but Grandma made the place.
despite a kitchen painted pink,
and filled it with grace.
Marilyn remembers.
And that’s the link:
a crank, a cot,
and a kitchen
painted pink.