Missionary Maverick

By Robert Goddard

This account of forty years of missionary work in Paraguay and preparation for this career in the USA is a career and testimony to the faithfulness of God. It is a very informative description of the practical obstacles and challenges of missionary work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781648954733

Book preview

Preface

My children and grandchildren have been requesting that I write my life story. They seem to think that there is something of value to be gained from it.

So much has been written that it seems superfluous to add more, but I realize that each individual life is unique and God in His grace deals differently with us all according to our needs and capabilities. I see my life as a very small splash in a very large pond, and though the waves are small, they keep moving in an ever-widening circle. If anything of value has been accomplished through my life, it is because of His grace and kindness to me and my family.

I selected the title Missionary Maverick for this book because we were unclaimed by any church or organization in our early days as missionaries, a good deal like an unbranded calf on the range who is such an undesirable specimen that no one took the trouble to slap his brand on it! I have tried in this account to tell it as it was, and thanks to my wife’s diary, I have been able to keep my facts and dates accurate and in chronological order. Some suggested that I should let someone else write my history, but I’ve noticed a tendency of those who write such things to glorify those about whom they are writing. I hope in this account to present the facts as I remember them and not always trying to keep my halo well adjusted!

R.C.G.

Roots

Both sets of my grandparents took homesteads in Central Nebraska. My parental grandfather, George Washington Goddard, located about a mile west of the small village of Weissert in the 1800s. In 1887, Grandfather Goddard died when he was only in his thirties, leaving Grandma with five young children. Being unable to manage the farm or to provide enough food to feed her family, she gave the three youngest children to neighbor friends and moved to Broken Bow where she obtained work in a hotel.

The next to the youngest child was my father who was two and a half years old, and he was given to a family named Skinner who in turn gave him to a childless couple, Bill and Hattie Menary. They treated Father well, and though they were not Christians, they sent him to Sunday school on an old white horse. In the process of time, he was saved in a revival meeting at the age of seventeen years, and though he was not well taught, he believed all the Bible. He never preached to us kids, but we all had that same confidence in the Word of God. My father struggled for years with the idea that he had to meet certain standards to retain his salvation, and many times, he felt he was lost because of falling into some sin. This struggle caused him to become very depressed to the point that at one time, he related to me years later, he told God, I’m yours whether you want me or not.

My maternal grandparents were Fabius and Louisa Mills. They moved to Nebraska from Seneca, Wisconsin, in a covered wagon in 1878. Grandfather was born in Ohio on December 10, 1845. His parents as well as Grandmother’s parents came from England. He received his primary education in local schools and later attended an academy in Pennsylvania. He farmed on his own, taught school for twelve years, and served two years as county superintendent of schools in Crawford County, Wisconsin.

Hearing that there was good land open for homesteading in Nebraska, he took his wife and four children in a covered wagon pulled by his only team of horses, with the milk cow tied to the rear of the wagon and they headed for Nebraska. He had only sixty dollars in his pocket; they stopped at farmhouses along the way to buy bread, potatoes, and other vegetables. At Des Moines, Iowa, he had to trade off one of his horses which had gone lame for a smaller one. They came to Council Bluffs and crossed the Missouri River on a railroad car. After a six-week trip, they arrived in York County, Nebraska, where Grandma had relatives. Grandfather left the family there with relatives and went to Custer County to prepare a home for them on the land he had homestead, which was one and a half miles north of Westerville. He built a sod house where they lived for twelve years and then a frame house took its place.

Hail and drought plagued the new land, and after six years, only two crops were harvested. Since Grandfather had a good education and had studied law, he passed his Nebraska bar exams, and between law cases and selling insurance, the family made out better than some. Seventeen children were born to the family. My mother related an interesting incident which happened before; she said, Father called Mother to come see the first field of corn. She had just put supper on the table. As she passed the high chair, her baby held out her hands, so Mother picked her up. As she walked out the door, there was a crash. The ridgepole had come down on the high chair and the table! Sod houses had roofs made of timber with sod laid on top, so they were very heavy. In rainy season, grass and sometimes flowers grew on the roof.

Floors were made of hard-packed clay and could only be swept and occasionally sprinkled to settle the dust. Children went to school in a sod schoolhouse with no desks, only planks on which to sit and to write. Some of the students were sixteen to twenty years old because of having to work on the farm and missing part of the school year. They, being too big for the teacher to handle, sometimes caused a discipline problem in the school. One school went through three teachers in one term, so they hired a man teacher the next year. On the first day of school, he called all the students in from recess, and when they were seated, he laid his six-shooter on the desk and announced that there would be order that year, and there was!

It would be very difficult for the younger generation to feature the hardships of pioneer life in Nebraska in those early days. The added problems of drought, blizzards, hail, and floods plus a tornado now and then resulted in only the most hardy being able to survive. The following is an excerpt from a letter written by one of my relatives, Abigail Rosie Mills Emerson, to her daughter Bessie and son-in-law in August 1885:

Dear son and daughter:

I now take the present time to write you a letter. It is a cold, wet rainy day. Lennie and I are all alone, and all the firewood we have is what hay we can pull out of the roof of the stable inside where it is dry. Now don’t go pitying me for I don’t need it. I have a good warm coat on, enough to eat, and I would not exchange places with anybody if I could. I have not seen Molly yet since I came home; she was going to stay two weeks, then if I want her, she will come. If I keep as well as I am now, I can get along, if she will come and do the washing once in two weeks. If I let her go down to Hamilton to work, we shall have to get a washing machine. Father sent a letter to the county clerk concerning the bounty on wolf scalps. He got two letters last night, one from the county clerk, a pretty saucy one too, stating that he was not paying the debts of the state of Nebraska and, if the state was owing him anything on wolf scalps, to get it himself or authorize someone who is buying up claims. Our pieplant nearly all spoiled; if we’d cut off the leaves, it would have been all right, but the leaves wilted and decayed, and where they touched the pieplant, it rotted and was fly-blown. Where the leaves did not touch it, it was good and fresh. Mrs. Harris gave me a little white duck and then Mrs. Hoetzel gave us a black one for company; we have them yet. They’re getting along nicely, and the pigs are doing first rate. The horses eat up all my sweet corn while I was at camp meeting and the pigs eat all my flowering moss; it was so pretty, as double they could be. Old Doll died and Bally is so poor that Lennie would not hitch her up, and they were both looking first rate when they got through plowing corn. Lennie hitched Ginnie on the corn plow and does what hauling he has to do. I went once on it to Hiltons day before yesterday; it was raining a little, so I had my parasol on. When Bell saw me through the window, she said she was scared; she couldn’t think what kind of a rig was coming. Lennie has just come home with some brush he said he found on the vacant forty in the canyon, I’m glad he did not find it before, it will keep us in fire all day. When we burn hay, we can only have a fire while we cook because we have only what is on the stable roof, but we have lots of sunflowers cut down and they will be ready to burn in a few days, then won’t we have a good warm fire! Maybe we can bake again too.

Oh, I tell you, there’s a good day coming when the cornstalks are ripe and the sunflowers dried and the cow chips baked and the fleas froze up. Oh, if the rest of you could only agree with me on these things and look at them in the same light that I do. I believe I would be too happy to live, but there is nothing too hard for God to bring about, and while life lasts, I will not cease to hope and pray for you. Oh, what a comfort in time of trouble, what consolation in affliction, and what a rest when we are weary. I have realized it this summer as I’ve never done before. Twice since I came to Custer County has God raised me from the brink of the grave when I knew that no human hand could save me. And when I heard my friends so often wondering at it and expressing their surprise, it was no mystery to me at all. I knew where my help came from, and now I consider my life is no longer mine and the rest of my life must be spent in the service of God. Oh, if I’d only brought my children up to love and honor Him, what hours of remorse I might have saved myself, but all I can do now is to try to repair the wrong and strive to make up for the neglect of my duty and leave the rest to my Redeemer who is always ready to help and forgive, and I hope I may every day grow more worthy of the many mercies and blessings I receive from Him. I must close now with my best love to you all.

Your Mother

It was into such a scenario that Grandma Goddard was thrust when her husband died and left her with no way to care for her family of five children. That same year of 1887 was a drought year according to Custer County history, and the next year was the winter of the great blizzard of 1888 when much livestock as well as many people died. I can find very little in the Goddard history where they came from before moving to Nebraska or about any ancestors other than what I have heard from my father and mother and they knew very little. Most of the aunts and uncles scattered to other parts of the country and not much contact was made with them except for rare and short visits.

The Mills tribe on the other hand seemed to have prospered, and most of them settled around the Westerville area. Three of the children had died in infancy, one in an accident, and Aunt Sylvia died of tuberculosis when she was twenty-two years old. This left twelve including my mother, so I had a wealth of aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived in our area and with whom we often visited.

My parents were married March 15, 1908. Mother’s maiden name was Alice Rhoda Mills. She was the thirteenth child in her family. She was eighteen years old and my father twenty-three when they were married.

They started their married life on a farm about three miles south west of Weissert where my brother George was born in December.

Grandmother Mills died in 1910, and Mother stayed that summer with her father and the family as they adjusted to life without wife and mother. That summer, my father became a salesman for the Seminole Patent Medicine and Extract Co., using what was called a medicine wagon drawn by a team of horses. That fall, they moved to Loup City, Nebraska, for the winter, then they moved from Loup City to Mason City where Dad worked for a farmer named Mr. Marston. In 1915, they moved to their own farm in the Dry Valley community where I was born May 9, 1917. I was number four in a family of six children and that is where my story began.

My parents with their two oldest children

Growing Pains

I was, I am told, assisted into this world by a midwife whose name was Mrs. Hayes. The farm where I was born was located on the southern edge of the Dry Valley community and our house was at the foot of a large hill to the east over which ran the road to Highway 183. This same road continued west past the Johnson place over a high ridge of hills to the Weissert community. The house was small, four rooms, of frame construction, and later a small room in the back provided more bedroom space. In front of our house, beyond the yard fence were several cedar trees and the windmill, and across the road to the south were the barn and hog shed. The chicken coop and chicken yard were to the west as well as the shop and wash house combination building.

It was in this wash house that mother’s first power washing machine was installed. It had a pulley near the base driven by the one-cylinder Cushman engine, and a shaft driven from the same pulley powered an eighteen-inch grind stone that was used to grind tools and mower sickle sections for cutting hay.

North of the house was the orchard which consisted of a row of mulberry trees on the far edge, several cherry trees, two Queen Ann plum trees, two Whitney crab apple trees, some gooseberry bushes, currant bushes, and rhubarb plants. There was a wild plum thicket just west of the orchard, and beyond that, a grove of box elder trees in whose shade, machinery was parked. North of the orchard was the alfalfa field, and the east side of the farm was planted to corn and small grain. On the west was a meadow of natural prairie grass, and on the south was the pasture.

Our nearest neighbor was the Rob Johnson family, about a quarter of a mile west over a small low ridge, and they lived in a sod house which was stuccoed on the outside with cement. They had two girls, the oldest being my age, and since our parents visited back and forth quite often, she was my first playmate. One of my earliest memories was riding with Mom, Mrs, Johnson, and Kathryn in our one-horse buggy to the store in Weissert to sell cream and eggs and buy groceries. Earl Pirnie owned and operated the store with his wife Vinie, and it seemed to me he had everything in that store.

There were all sorts of hardware, pots and pans, pails and cream cans, tools of all sorts for the farmers, dry goods plus bib overalls (OshKosh B’Gosh), shoes and over shoes, harness for work horses, curry combs, brushes, and shears to cut their tails and manes. Also there were wire mesh nose baskets to protect horses from nose flies as well as fly nets to protect them from flies.

Pirnie’s general store.Weissert, Nebraska in 1924

Of course, there was an assortment of groceries and candies. There was a gasoline pump and one for kerosene for the farmer’s lamps and lanterns. Mom had a five-gallon kerosene can with a spout for pouring; of course, the cap for the spout had been lost long ago, so Earl always used a large gumdrop for a cork which I thought could have been put to a better use.

Among my earliest recollections was the time when all of us retreated to the cellar because of a tornado nearby. This same tornado struck my uncle’s farm near Weissert, destroying their house and killing my cousin Ed McArthur before he could reach the cellar. I remember the front cover of their piano was found in a field about two miles from their place.

Cellars were dug some six feet deep, covered with timber and earth, mounded on top to shed the rain and snow water. Every farm had one, and they were used for keeping the winter’s potato supply as well as other vegetables from freezing in the winter. In the summer, it also served as a cool place to keep milk and butter. They usually were roughly ten feet wide by twelve feet long with a partition to keep potatoes from scattering, and shelves were built along the sides to store canned fruit and vegetables.

There were no refrigerators in those days, only ice boxes with a compartment at the top lined with zinc metal where ice was put with a place for the water to drain out through a pipe into a container. Cold air from the ice went down into the food storage space where there were two shelves for food. Ice was brought in from our ice house in blocks for the ice chest.

The ice house was a rectangular hole fifteen by ten by six feet dug into the ground, covered with timber and earth, much the same as the cellar in construction. Straw was placed on the floor about one foot deep. Ice was hauled in from a pond one and a half miles west of our place. The blocks were cut out of the pond with ice saws and were fourteen by twenty-eight by fifteen inches thick. These blocks were placed in layers of about twenty-four to a layer and as many layers as the ice house could accommodate. There was a space about ten inches reserved around the outside between the wall and the ice, and this was packed with new straw for insulation. After the ice was all put in, a layer of straw about twenty-four inches deep was spread on top and the door closed, and you were ready for warm weather.

For hauling ice, the horses or mules had to be sharp shod, which meant their shoes had round caulks on the bottom with hardened steel centers so that as they wore down, they would always be sharp enough to keep their footing on ice or frozen ground. Several neighbors worked together in marking, cutting, and loading the ice on the wagons. It took a good team of horses or mules to pull these loads up any incline, so if they had a hill to go over, one farmer left his load and used his team to help get the other load up the hill. Then they left that load and took both teams back to get the other load.

Dad had a team of mules which could get over the hill on their own. Going down the hill with this kind of load was more than a team could hold back, so they would use a rough lock, which was a chain wrapped around the wheel to give it traction on snow or frozen ground, then the wheel or wheels were locked with the hand brake until they reached relatively level ground.

Wagons in those days had wooden wheels with steel tires. These wheels would shrink in very dry weather and the tires had to be reset. I have seen my father do this in the following manner. The tire was removed and a strip of burlap tacked around the outside of the wheel. Then the tire was heated red hot in a big fire, and the wooden wheel rims were placed on blocks to prevent the heated tire from dropping out of place. Three men with steel hooks or tongs placed the red-hot rim on the dampened wheel and quenched it immediately with buckets of water. This shrunk the tire down on the burlap caulking and the whole wheel was tight again.

Getting back again to the subject of ice, we often made ice cream in a gallon freezer in hot weather for family gatherings on a Sunday afternoon or when our neighbors, the Johnsons, visited after supper in the evenings. I remember one evening after eating ice cream, I climbed into a wash boiler and decided I would sleep there, but before long, being cramped and cold, I changed my mind and told Mom I wanted to get in my bed. Those old wash boilers were only about fourteen inches wide and two feet long, so I must have been pretty small.

My dad and Rob Johnson both chewed tobacco, so if they ran out, they would borrow from each other. One time, Dad sent me over to Johnson’s for a plug of tobacco, and Kathryn got permission to come back with me. On the way home, we decided to try a chew from the plug. I think she forgot to spit and got very sick; unfortunately, I didn’t. I don’t remember whether I got spanked for that or not, but I should have.

Another try at the weed when I was very small was when I rolled a cigarette in paper with dirt for tobacco, but according to Mother, my first drag resulted in a mouthful of dirt and I disgustedly threw it down. Ah, tobacco! That was the plague of my youth. I tried it in every form and liked it. Whenever we cousins got together, we usually came up with something to smoke, even if it were cornsilks or sage. We would buy, borrow, or steal it. We would even tear apart cigarette butts and roll them up in cigarette paper. Of course, this all had to be done on the sly.

By the time I was twelve years old, I had the habit and craved nicotine. My younger days were made miserable by that cursed habit. We had a younger cousin who ran us and was pretty cocky. He thought he could smoke anything, so we rolled him one with dry horse droppings when he wasn’t looking. He took a few puffs, but he couldn’t handle it and threw it regretfully away. We later told him what he was trying to smoke. I don’t remember his reaction, but since he was too small to do anything about it, he let go peacefully.

Each summer, I would visit for a week with my cousins near Westerville. There were Frank Allen, Lloyd Mills, and Dean Mills. One summer we four, with Ed Scott and Dean’s younger brother Jerry, had a slumber party down on the banks of Clear Creek by one of our swimming holes. We had a rule that every hour, we had to go swimming. Along about one o’clock in the morning, there came up a thunderstorm, so we hurried to a neighbor’s barn and, in the dark, lay down on the nice dry floor to sleep. Pretty soon, we realized that what we were sleeping on was full of chicken mites. Also about that time, both of my ears started hurting. At daybreak, we went down to Uncle Ross Mills’s place and Aunt Tina put us to bed. It wasn’t long before I was burning with a fever due to infection in both ears. Well, they took me to the doctor in Ansley, and he fixed me up, then they took me home to convalesce. Wow! What a crazy way to have fun.

Occasionally, I would visit my McArthur cousins who lived in Broken Bow. My Aunt Mabel was a very kind lady with a great sense of humor. My cousin Shirley was the same age as I, about six or seven, and we had lots of fun together. We were playing in the living room mimicking different animals, so Shirley pretended she was a hen on a nest. She would sit for awhile, then jump up and cackle as if she had laid an egg. Her mother on the sly slipped a china nest egg under her, and when she jumped up and cackled, she turned around and her eyes got big. She said, I really did lay an egg!

One special time for me was when my dad took a wagon load of fat hogs to Comstock to sell, and he let me go along. We rode high up on a spring seat above the hogs. Since it was hot weather, he would stop along the way at some farmer’s place and throw buckets of water on the hogs to cool them down. It was thirteen miles to Comstock, so it probably took four or five hours to make the trip one way. We had to cross the Middle Loup River bridge just before getting to town, and it seemed to me a tremendously long way across that river.

On these trips to town with Dad, he would buy flour from the flour mill which was powered by a water wheel over by Comstock. Farmers brought their grain to be milled for a percentage or for a set price per pound. For grinding feed for the chickens and hogs at home, Dad had a horse-powered grinder which had a sweep pole to which the horses were hitched, and as they went around and around, the grain was ground. Sometimes cornmeal or wheat was ground for breakfast food or to make corn bread. Mother mixed ground wheat with her flour to make a delicious whole wheat bread. One of my favorite snacks after school was a large slice of Mom’s bread plopped down on the morning’s kettle of cream. It would come up with a generous coat of cream on which I would sprinkle plenty of sugar. What better snack could you find to calm the hunger pangs?

One of my earlier memories was my folks preparing to leave in the old model T car and my two older sisters taking us younger ones back of the house where they sang, shouted, and carried on to drown out the sound of the car leaving so that we little ones wouldn’t protest being left with our baby sitters. It was quite a production, and it seemed to be quite effective.

As far back as I can remember, the highlight of the day was when Mother read to us in the evenings, and I wouldn’t venture to guess at how many books she read to us. When she read, the whole family gathered around, some in chairs, some on the floor and maybe a little one on her lap. When Mom read, you not only heard the story, you lived it; thus, each book was a journey into many parts of the world. She read with eloquent expression whether it was pathos, humor, or high adventure. All of us children developed the reading habit. How much superior was this to the present day habit of viewing television with its questionable programs and commercials. And my, how it drew the family together!

When I began giving recitations at school or other public affairs, Mother was my drama coach. She insisted that I speak clearly, loud enough for the audience to hear (no PA systems in those days!) and with expression. Just a word here for my posterity. Please don’t mumble or talk monotone like some robot. If what you have to say is important, then say it so people can understand it and know you mean it! Reading was done by kerosene lamps or gasoline pressure lanterns in those days. I was eighteen years old before I lived in a house with electricity.

When I was old enough, I had the job of cutting sunflowers out of the cornfields with a corn knife or at times with a sharp hoe. Dad farmed with four horses and one team of mules. Corn was planted with a one-row lister or with a two-row corn planter. Cultivating was done with either two horses on a one-row cultivator or four horses on a two-row cultivator. Ground was prepared by first plowing, then disking and then narrowing. By the time I was eleven, I could harness, hitch, and work horses on simple machinery.

In haying season, we teamed up with our neighbor Rob Johnson. Mowing was done with a horse-drawn mower with a five-foot cutter bar. When dry enough, the hay was raked into windrows with a dump rake and then came stacking day. The overshot stacker was staked down at the stacking site and a team of horses were hooked to the stacker cable. The stacker head was eight or ten feet wide with wooden teeth about six feet long. The hay was picked up from the windrows with a hay sweep powered by two horses.

The load was brought in and pushed onto the stacker head, then the sweep backed out and the load was ready to be raised to the stack. The stacker had adjustable arms, and as the stack grew, the arms had to be extended. A set of pulleys and cable gave the needed advantage, so when the team pulled on the cable, the load was lifted up and thrown backward onto the stack to shape it, and when it reached the required height, he rounded the top so as to shed the rain and snow water. If he had done his job