By the Ives Siblings: Cathy Beaulieu, Roger Ives, Jackie Hemond and Missy Moxley with Estelle Ives Stetson, our aunt
Our grandfather, Roger Leete Ives, Jr., aka Leete, moved to Suffield to farm in 1933. His wife, our grandmother, had recently died, leaving him with four young children; their ages were 8, 7, 5 and 3. The two younger children, Marilyn and Shirley, were sent to live with their maternal grandmother until they became older. The older two children were Roger Leete Ives III, our father, who was the eldest, and his sister Estelle. In a car piled high with household items, they, with Leete, left their farm in South Britain, Connecticut to start life anew at 311 Halladay Avenue. Their two workhorses, driven by the hired hand, pulled their hay wagon filled with farming tools and more household goods.
The house was large enough for the family, a hired hand, a housekeeper and Leete’s mother, who lived with them on occasion.
The bathroom was an outhouse. Water was fed into the barn and house by a gravity-fed pipe from a spring on a hill to the east. A tobacco shed was converted to a cow barn with stanchions for the cows and space for tools and hay. A second older tobacco barn stored extra hay. The milk cans were kept cool by a tank of spring water in the barn.
A large field lay behind the house. The pasture extended down to the Town Farm, now a residence at 463 Halladay Avenue. In between, there was a good-sized watering hole fed by Muddy Brook, which was suitable for a refreshing swim. Leete, despite other demands, taught his children how to swim, mindful that the water presented a hazard.
It was the height of the Great Depression. In addition to managing hisfarm, Leete took on jobs. He delivered grain for A.C. Wetherell in exchange for grain for his own cows. He probably worked for Giles Halladay and Ray Randall on their farms. Bill Austin, who lived across the street, continually reminded him that there was more money in tobacco than cattle farming, but Leete refused to grow tobacco because he thought it was a vice.
The children worked on the farm with their father. In those days, tractors were rare. The work was done by horsepower and manpower.
Our father, though only a child, worked as hard as a grown man. At haying time, the mown grass was raked into long windrows. Estelle drove the horses between the rows while Leete, using a hayfork, threw the hay atop the wagon, and Roger, in the wagon, organized the hay.
In the barn, the action was much the same. The horses, steadied by Estelle pulled a roped fork-lift of hay which was guided upward by Leete to Roger who organized the hay in the haymow.
The children weeded the garden and tended the chickens, among other chores. When a calf was born, it was Estelle’s job to strip the milk from the cow’s teats to prevent mastitis. One day, a cow collapsed after giving birth due to ketosis, a lack of sugar. Leete hoisted the cow up with a belt looped over the rafters so he could milk her. He fed the cow Coca Cola and she survived.
Leete started a 4-H club and sang in the choir at the First Congregational Church. Once, Leete used the horses to pull a bakery truck from a ditch. As payment for his kindness, the truck driver rewarded the family with a feast of donuts and cupcakes. The kids swam in the summer and slid down the Halladay Avenue hill in the winter. Our father became a champion cow judge at agricultural fairs.
During the school year, Roger and Estelle attended the one-room schoolhouse on the corner of Halladay Avenue and North Street.
Leete overworked himself. In 1938, he collapsed, sick with pleurisy. Then, while recovering at the hospital, he contracted a staph infection that quickly killed him.
Just before he died, Leete had been working to improve the farm and his finances. He explored the viability of market gardening by planting a field of cucumbers.
At the farm auction after Leete’s death, our father stood by the podium as each of the 30 cows were auctioned. Just 13, he knew each cow’s age, milk production and breeding status. A few weeks later, our father, scoring higher than much older participants, won the cow judging contest at the Eastern States Exposition, just days after the 1938 Hurricane.
Roger and Estelle left Suffield after the auction to join their sisters at their grandmother’s house in Tewksbury, Massachusetts but Suffield had left its mark on our father. In the five years that he lived in Suffield, he came to love the town.
In 1955, 17 years later, our father returned to Suffield to raise his family and start his pioneering business, “Soligenics Frozen Semen Service.”
Offering a complete service for the cattle breeder, he traveled to farms in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states to collect semen from bulls, stored it with dry ice and later liquid nitrogen, and shipped it throughout the United States and internationally. He worked as a matchmaker, advising farmers on what genetic qualities in both bull and cow made the best offspring for milk production. His was one of the first businesses to do this work. Suffield, his beloved childhood home, with its close connection to the highway, the airport and bus transportation, was an ideal location for his business.