Marge Drendel, Oral History Interview

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Marge-Drendel-Audio
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Q1: Well thank you both for being here today, with the Huntley Historical Society, and thanks for allowing us to interview the both of you. And maybe we could start by just getting some initial background, and Marge, you were born, when were you born?
Marge Drendel: I was born in 1925 at what is now O’Hare Field, that’s Bensenville, Illinois, between Bensenville and Elk Grove Village, on a farm.
Q1: On a farm in that area.
Marge Drendel: In that area.
Q1: And at that time, were you born in a hospital, or ?
Marge Drendel: No, I was actually born in the farmhouse.
Q1: And did you go to school in that area too?
Marge Drendel: I went to Lincoln School on York Road, between Bensenville, and Elk Grove.
Q1: And what did your, obviously your father was a farmer.
Marge Drendel: Yes.
Q1: Your mother and father both were involved in the farm?
Marge Drendel: Yes. We had a dairy farm.
Q1: And did you have brothers and sisters?
Marge Drendel: I had two sisters and two brothers, and my two brothers are deceased, but I still have two sisters.
Q1: Are they still in farming, any of them?
Marge Drendel: My sister June married David Miller, and they are farming in Monroe, Wisconsin. They have a large dairy farm. And my sister Ruth is retired and she lives in [0:01:35.2 inaudible] now.
Q1: Where did you go to school in that area? You went to grammar school in –
Marge Drendel: Well, grammar school was the end of it. I didn’t get to go to high school. 2
Q1: Well, that was not that unusually –
Marge Drendel: We moved from Bensenville to Elgin, at the time it was the month of October, so I didn’t, I went to work in Elgin, instead.
Q1: But you did go through, you graduated from grammar school?
Marge Drendel: Right.
Q1: And when you said you went to Elgin, were you living in Elgin at that time?
Marge Drendel: Well, we moved to a farm East of Elgin; my parents had a dairy farm there.
Q1: So you were still, a farm upbringing –
Marge Drendel: I was still a farmer.
Q1: Yeah.
Marge Drendel: I milked cows by hand when I was 14 until I was about 18.
Q1: I was going to ask you, what did you do for fun or excitement – I’m sure part of it was work. You know there’s always a lot of work if you’re on a farm.
Marge Drendel: I went to the Blue Moon Ballroom for fun.
Q1: Was that in Elgin, then?
Marge Drendel: Yeah. That’s where I met my husband.
Q1: And where did you go to high school – oh, you didn’t go to high school.
Marge Drendel: No, I didn’t go to high school.
Q1: So when did you meet your husband?
Marge Drendel: I met him in, at that Blue Moon, in 1945, and we got married in 1946.
Q1: Did World War II have any effect on you or any of your family at that point?
Marge Drendel: Yes, it did. I had many cousins that were injured, and a couple of them were killed. Very, very sad time.
Q1: What was life like, at that point on the farm?
Marge Drendel: Well, we had gas rationing; we had sugar rationing; we had coffee rationing; we had shoes –
Q1: So it was difficult to – 3
Marge Drendel: Couldn’t buy a refrigerator.
Q1: Kind of basic. There were cars being sold and trucks at that point, too.
How did your family get around at that point? Did they have a truck, or –
Marge Drendel: Yeah, we had one family car and we had a truck, for the whole family.
Q1: And then when you got married, you had a family, obviously.
Marge Drendel: Three daughters.
Q1: Three daughters. And Diane, were you, when did you guys come back toward Huntley?
Dianne: When they were married.
Q1: Oh, so you left the Elgin area and –
Marge Drendel: To Huntley.
Q1: And then, still a farm.
Marge Drendel: Farming.
Q1: So then Diane, you grew up on a farm?
Dianne: I grew up on four farms here.
Q1: And you went to the school system here?
Dianne: I went through the Huntley School System, which is now an apartment building, first and second grade, then I moved to a building that is no longer there, on Lincoln, now I’m on Del Webb.
Q1: And when were you born?
Dianne: ’47.
Q1: ’47. Okay, and then you went –the schools in Huntley were still relatively small at that time.
Dianne: They were small. Some of my teachers were the same teachers my father had had. So, it was interesting.
Q1: Yeah, we had some of the other interview people that said they’re very pleased with the school system. They’re very pleased with the teachers. It sounds like you had some of the same ones. 4
Dianne: I had some of the teachers my father had, and my daughter had some of the teachers that I had. So it’s just carried on for generations.
Q1: That’s a good thing there. And then you went to high school, also in the area?
Dianne: Yes. Right on Lincoln Street. That school’s been torn down.
Q1: And what did you guys do for excitement, that you can talk about.
Dianne: Busy working on the farms, because then we were farming on our own, in high school. Baling hay, milking cows . . .
Q1: Now, did you have a lot of interaction with the town people? I know there were many kids, the town kids versus the –
Dianne: Yeah, we still had the sports and –
Q1: Did a lot of that.
Dianne: Then when I was 15, I started working at the Dairy Mart, which is still in Huntley, the Huntley Dairy Mart.
Q1: Still there, right.
Dianne: Worked there for about five years, on and off. Worked at the coil factory there on, out on the blacktop, which is now [0:05:47.0 inaudible]. So, all of it’s [0:05:49.5 inaudible].
Q1: Old school. And did you go to college at all after high school? Or did you stay here?
Dianne: Worked at the Caddy Corporation, which is now [0:05:58.8 inaudible]. Milton’s are still around.
Q1: I was going to say, more than a few of those.
Dianne: Yeah.
Q1: So you kind of went to work after high school. Hey, what happens during high school? Were there a lot of dances and things like that?
Dianne: There were dances, football games, basketball games.
Q1: Regular, every day stuff.
Dianne: Mm-hmm –
Q1: Then you got married? 5
Dianne: Got married, and moved to Texas for a while.
Q1: Oh, what area in Texas? Oh, that’s an army thing.
Dianne: An army -
Q1: Your husband was in the service?
Dianne: Mm-hmm –
Q1: Did you stay there for a long time?
Dianne: I was there 18 months, and then we came back to Huntley. I lived in a building that was converted into a duplex. It had been the toll way offices, when they were putting the toll way in. And they turned it into a duplex, and now it’s kind of a [0:06:49.7 inaudible] at 47 and Freeman Road.
Q1: And what did your husband do after the service?
Dianne: Union Special.
Q1: Oh, he went to work at Union Special. And you have a family, too, then?
Dianne: I have one daughter who lives in Plainfield.
Q1: She went the other direction.
Dianne: She went the other direction. And they own a business down there, and they have three step-children. One of them’s in Huntley, he’s an electrician, I have one in Colorado who is in computers, and a step-daughter in California who is a bookkeeper for a stable. Spread out.
Q1: Spread out. But those are different places to go. That’s always –
Dianne: We travel a lot.
Q1: And you, on the farm, in the early days of the farm, was everything, we’ve talked about electrification of the farms – everything powered by electric. The water and the everyday things, or was that something that you guys all had to deal with?
Marge Drendel: Well, I married Floyd Drendel, and then we lived with his parents for a couple of months. That was the Frank Drendel farm, over on Drendel Road, here in Huntley. And then we lived on one of his dad’s farms. And they had a big dairy, so Floyd and his brother George milked the dairy for quite a few years, then George got married, then we moved across the road on another one of Frank Drendel’s farms, and Floyd would drive over and milk the cows. And they had steers and then 1959, we bought a farm of our own on Route 47, closer to Huntley, which is now a Walgreens Drugstore and a strip mall. And 6
our, we had another farm further South down the road, and that is part of Del Webb now.
Q1: How big were these farms? The last two, I would say.
Marge Drendel: The farm that we lived on was 80 acres, and the farm we sold to Del Webb was 117.
Q1: Because, if I’m correct, I think a lot of the Drendel Farm was sold to Del Webb, is that right?
Marge Drendel: Mm-hmm. And the farm we lived on, we sold in the year 2000, and we sold it in the morning, and my husband died in the afternoon, the very same day. And that was 12 years ago. So now I live by myself at Gilberts. I have a ranch.
Q1: But you’re away, of course, from farming all together.
Marge Drendel: My husband was there six weeks when he passed away.
Q1: That’s always a –
Marge Drendel: It was a very stressful time.
Q1: Yeah, for sure, because those farms, now, a lot of the farms here, you would have thought would have moved into developments, too, but of course, for the last six years or so, - not much has been [0:09:41.5 inaudible]
Marge Drendel: We didn’t have any sons to farm, and my husband got cancer, and for two years he couldn’t do anything, so we didn’t have much choice.
Q1: Right. I know sometimes they lease the land out to people, too, and they can do the work if you’re not physically able to take care of those things.
Dianne: They were widening 47 then.
Q1: There was a lot going on.
Dianne: The traffic and the noise, and pulling out on the highway from the farm yard was a real trick.
Q1: Yeah, took your life in your hands.
Marge Drendel: And a lot of diesel fumes from the trucks on 47.
Dianne: We were too close to the highway.
Q1: Just trying to get a little reaction to the development of Del Webb, versus beforehand. Do you guys see that overall as a good thing, or maybe something in-between, or has it changed Huntley too much? 7
Dianne: I live there, and I really like the place.
Marge Drendel: It was – I was surprised how fast it took off. You know. It’s a beautiful area.
Q1: Yeah, because that, probably the single biggest thing that changed Huntley in the last 400 years, I’d say –
Dianne: When we got married I thought it would be agricultural forever.
Q1: Yeah, and I said, you’d think more of those farms would have probably gone to development, too, except that the economy changed.
Dianne: So many farms here went to development.
Q1: Mm-hmm. Where everybody.
Marge Drendel: There were other farms besides ours. We didn’t have the whole Del Webb –
Q1: Now, did you fill out one of those forms that? No. Okay, I didn’t – I think we covered most of it. There were some farm questions that would have been in there, but I think we covered a lot of that. And if there’s anything else you’d like to add to the discussion, about growing up, or living on a farm, or farm life itself –
Marge Drendel: Yeah, I miss the farm life.
Q1: And I think again, talking to the people we’ve already interviewed, they all feel like those were good days.
Marge Drendel: Yeah.
Q1: They liked being on a farm and they liked the lifestyle. And I said to some of them, even though it was –
Marge Drendel: [0:11:58.5 inaudible]
Dianne: It was hard work. Life was simpler then.
Q1: Yeah.
Marge Drendel: I drove the tractors for baling hay and for silo filling, and I worked right alongside my husband all the time.
Q1: As I say, a lot of hard work, and then of course, the wives, the farmer wives, did a lot of cooking and things around the house that always had to be done too. A lot of work for all of them.
Marge Drendel: A lot of work. 8
Q1: And I think today, there’s probably less, because you’ve got a lot of mechanical things you can do, to do the farm work. We’re talking 40, 50 – 70 years ago, was much more physical.
Marge Drendel: They don’t load hay bales anymore. Which we had to do.
Q1: See? A lot of changes.
Dianne: Carry five-gallon buckets of feed to the chicken house on my bicycle. To get from A to B, it’s fun when you’re going downhill.
Marge Drendel: [laughs]
Q1: I’m sure a lot of that’s changed, for sure.
Dianne: Another thing is automated augers. Forklifts.
Q1: Like I said, [0:12:55.5 inaudible]. Well, thank you both very much for being here today, and for allowing us to interview you and get a little background on your life. It was very nice, and we do appreciate it.
Marge Drendel: Thank you.
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[End of recording]