Businesses in Ekalaka

Several years ago, Ernest Tooke wrote a story about all the business, present time or not, that had been in Ekalaka. It was fairly complete, but I am going to tell you about one business that he didn't mention and tell you about one that I know practically nothing about. Then I will tell you about a kind of business that my Dad engaged in.

There used to be a creamery in Ekalaka. It was in a great big building close to where the Fairgrounds are now. They made butter and sold it. I don't know what else they made. I remember it being open, but it closed when I was quite young. Farmers all over the county milked cows and sent their milk or maybe only their cream to this creamery. I think that they fed their milk to the pigs. You would see cream cans alongside the mailbox. The mailman would pick them up and then return the empty, clean can later. This would never be allowed now, but I don't think that anyone ever got sick from it. A story emanated from this creamery, it might have been apocryphal or borrowed from somewhere else. The story goes that a lady brought in a pound of butter; she said that she had dropped it on the floor but it didn't get dirty. Would the proprietor exchange it for another one and sell it to someone else because, "what you don't know won't hurt you". So he agreed then took it in the back room, shuffled it around a bit and returned it to her because what you don't know won't hurt you.

There was a slaughter house a few miles out of town on the road to Tooke's. It might have been where the Miles City cut-across took off. It was long closed when I was there but Dad got permission to use it to kill something once in a while. The well was very hard pumping, as I know because I usually had to do the pumping, and it took lots of water to clean up all the blood. I don't know who owned it or when it was in business. Someone suggested that it might have been owned by Charley Pickard to supply Pickard's store but I don't know.

The other business that I was referring too was buying and selling that my Dad, Lee Lavell, did. He would go on a trip into the country and come back with almost anything, chickens, livestock or even a different car. He did a lot of trading and then he would speculate in private as to who got the better of the deal. One time he and Elmer Seiler traded shoes. Dad said that he got the worst of that deal. The first time I saw him buy rabbits, I saw them in a building next to our chicken house. There were white ghostly looking things all around the inside of the building. It was kind of dark and I didn't know what it was but it looked like ghosts. I had to go in to get the chicken feed and finally got up enough nerve to do so and then saw that it was frozen rabbits hanging from nails in bunches. Dad bought rabbits off and on for some years. He also bought metal like copper, brass and lead in batteries. Sometimes he was in competition with Chuck Kittelmann on the rabbits and scrap metal, but usually only one of them was buying at the same time.

Dad bought and sold horses all the time that he was in Ekalaka. After the war, tractors came into being and the horses were usually sold. Dad bought a lot of them. He sold some to Tooke's that became bucking horses and to many other people as well. Of course many were sold as canners. I could tell you of many adventures with horses. Sometimes I had to help him with the horses. One time I rode a horse and led 10 other horses from ten miles out to our house in Ekalaka all by myself. I was sure relieved when that was over. I was scared of horses. The truth is, that despite a lifetime of working and dealing with horses, my Dad was scared of them as well. Though, he would never admit that.

Dad would occasionally go down into South Dakota and find some young milk cows, buy them and bring them back home to sell. He sometimes needed a loan from Herb Albert at the bank for that and he usually got it. Sometimes he wouldn't though and then he would come home all down at the mouth about it. He always figured out something, I never saw him lose a deal because of money.

Dad butchered for a lot of people and sometimes it got him in trouble. The brand inspector hated Dad and was always trying to catch him at something. There was no more honest man that ever lived than Lee Lavell. He even was brought up on charges once, I forget the particulars but was quickly found not guilty. It was something about butchering a beef and one guy got half and the other guy got half. Maybe it was selling meat without a license.

Dad would go out in the country and come back with a whole bunch of chickens in gunny sacks. He would tell Mother to get the water on and then the whole family would go to work, killing, picking and dressing chickens. Sometimes he had them sold to a local restaurant and sometimes they were for us.

That was the business that my Dad was in. Of course, he would go to work occasionally on lambing or construction. Dad said that he would rather work with his brain than with his hands. I thought that was a very good philosophy. He did plenty of both. I guess that this story turned out to be mostly about my Dad, sorry.