Stephanie Croston

    The unidentified photo from the Jan. 9 Seward County Independent is unidentified no longer.
     The girl in the picture, taken in 1939 by John Vachon in Seward County, is Claudine Richters, although she was Claudine Abele when the picture was taken.
     Today, Claudine lives at Heartland Park in Seward, where she moved in 2000. Seeing the picture in 2008 was a surprise, since it had been identified in 1979, when the SCI printed it and asked who she was.
     She was 10 when the picture was taken on her family's farm near Utica. The polka-dotted dress she's wearing was a hand-me-down from a neighbor, she said, adding that the dots were bright red and blue and yellow. She wore lots of barrettes when she was younger, but never had long hair.
     She said she was a very shy girl. Her parents had a camera, but they didn't take many pictures. Her aunt was the family photographer, she said.
     She does not remember being photographed by Vachon, but she thought she might have been on her way to school.
     "I had to walk a mile and a half, when I was five, to District 36. They were mud roads and steep clay hills," she said.
     She attended Meyers Church School until she graduated from eighth grade in 1941 and then attended Utica High School, from which she graduated in 1945.
     She thought the picture might have been taken on a maintenance road on the family farm. Three people lived along that road, although no one lives there now.
     "They were going to put in a mill," Claudine said.
     Claudine's parents lived and died in Seward County. Her mother's father homesteaded two miles north and four miles east of Utica. Her father's parents immigrated from Germany and had 16 children, 12 of whom lived to adulthood. Her father, Jake, was child number eight.
     Her grandfather worked on the railroad and played the violin, she said.
     When Jake was eight, he went to live with Charlie Anstine, who lived in the same section where Claudine's mother, Agnes, lived. They went to the same school, Claudine said.
     One of Jake's jobs was cleaning the horse barn. He quit school in sixth grade to keep working to help support his family. After Jake and Agnes married in 1921, they lived with her mother and three younger sisters. The teachers at District 59 boarded with them, as well.
     Her parents still farmed with horses around the time the picture was taken. She said her parents milked cows, although that was a skill she never mastered. They would separate the cream to sell and then feed the skimmed milk to their hogs. They would take the cream to the railroad, where it was used to help fill a tanker.
     The family always had chickens, Claudine said. They had a laying flock of 200 hens, and she remembered one year with 600 chicks. She said they always bought hens late in the season so they would have better chances of survival. As an only child, one of her responsibilities was helping care for the chickens, she said.
     When they had extra fryers, they would take them to the grocery store in Utica, where there was a small pen out back to put the fryers for sale.
     She said the neighbors always helped each other with work like harvest and threshing. Grain was put into shocks to help store it at that time, and she remembered a windstorm so bad that a neighbor had to re-shock his grain.
     The Abeles had cats and dogs, including a boxer named Frippo.
     "I played with Frippo a lot," she said, adding that Frippo died when it was eight.
     They also had gardens in which they grew their own produce. At one time, they had three gardens, including one dedicated to potatoes. Claudine remembered her father putting two wagon loads of potatoes in the cave where they were stored one year.
     "We grew everything," she said, listing sweet corn, yellow beans, green beans, cabbages, potatoes and other vegetables. "We never ate all the potatoes."
     She said she helped her mother make bread and even had her own little bread pan. Her father could cut and sell wood, and Claudine remembered burning the waste and stumps in the evenings.
     For entertainment, Claudine remembered going to the theater in Utica and attending free shows in the park.
     Both Claudine and her mother kept journals and diaries, but Claudine said she is missing her diaries from 1939. She remembered a trip to Missouri in 1938 to see an uncle. She went with another aunt and uncle, covering 1,800 miles in one week.
     Also in 1938, Claudine said, she remembered sitting at the Utica Cemetery and watching crews pave Highway 34 through Utica.
     She said her last entry was when she went to the doctor and learned she was expecting her first child.
     In 1942, Claudine said, she remembered a snowstorm that buried cars. While she was in high school, she stayed with her grandmother in Utica.
     Her family listened to the radio, and Claudine remembered shows like Fibber McGee and Molly and Henry Aldrich. When they got electricity in the 1940s, the family purchased a refrigerator and a Speed Queen washing machine.
     She said she and her mother played Chinese checkers, and she played solitaire. She also did embroidery and made paper dolls. She drew both cartoons and models, her son Roger said.
     Her mom's sister and brother-in-law lived six miles away from the Abeles. Claudine said Sundays after church, the family would gather at her grandmother's home for dinner. Sometimes the family would get a block of ice and chip it to make ice cream.
     "It was always vanilla," she said.
     The men would take off their jackets and mix the ice cream in their shirt sleeves on the north side of the house, she said.
     After she graduated from high school, she took a correspondence business course. She could have gone to school in Omaha to take the same course, which cost less than $70.
     In October of 1947, she went to work for an insurance agency above the J.C. Penney's store in downtown Seward. Her boss was Bill Kipp, and Cecil Boals, who ran a real estate business, worked out of the same office. She worked there until June of 1948 when she got married.
     While in Seward, she boarded with the mayor's family in a house north of the old clinic. The other boarders were the mayor's granddaughter and a school teacher, she said.
     Claudine's husband, Gerald Richters, served in the Army Air Force in World War II, driving trucks approximately seven miles behind the front lines, her son Roger said. They met when her father took some extra tomatoes to Gerald's family's farm.
     "He came over and asked me for a date," Claudine said. "We went to the movies mostly."
     She went to school with Gerald's sisters and brother. In fact, one sister was in her class.
     Gerald and Claudine married when she was 19. They started on a farm near McCool Junction, where they lived for three years, and then returned to Claudine's family's farm, where they lived until 1988. They retired and moved into Utica.
     On the farm, the Richterses had hogs and cattle to go with their chickens. After Roger took over the farm, Claudine still helped with chores, driving anhydrous tanks and hauling pipe.
     "Then he got married, and was I glad," she said, laughing.
     She said her sons, Gary and Roger, and grandchildren have been sources of enjoyment for her. She has two grandchildren, two step-grandchildren and three step-great-grandchildren.
     Claudine's family's farm is still in the family and is currently farmed by Roger. Roger started with livestock when he got four rabbits for Easter one year. At one point, he said, he had more than 200 rabbits. He also raised hogs and cattle and ground their feed by hand. In the summers, he would have more than 200 head of hogs and between 50 and 60 head of cattle.
     Roger described his mother as a giver. He said she has made more than 40 handbags for residents at Heartland Park to use on their walkers to help carry mail and other items.
     "I brought my sewing machine," Claudine said, adding that in addition to the bags, she has also helped with hemming pants, narrowing pant legs and doing some mending for both residents and staff at Heartland Park.
     She likes to play bingo and pitch, which she used to play three times a week. She likes to read and subscribes to a daily paper, the Seward County Independent and magazines like Reminisce and Country Woman.
     She has been a member of the Lutheran church all her life. When her children were younger, she was a Cub Scout den mother and taught Sunday school. She was a member of the local homemakers club, which got its lessons from the county Extension office.