I cannot discover when Mom and Dad moved to the Old Hyde Place. I know it was before 1945 — the year I was born — and probably after 1936 when Dad went to work for the federal prison system in Springfield, Missouri. What I do know is that the farm was never a real income producer for the folks and its buildings were old and generally run down by the time they arrived.

Over time, Dad tried to make some improvements to the place. And, of course, the fire in 1949 that burned the house to the ground took care of a forced improvement in the living conditions. But full-time employment kept Dad from being a full-time farmer, and farms just don’t prosper without full-time attention.

In retrospect, the Old Hyde Place was more housing and hobby than anything else. Also, and this is key to understanding why we remained on that farm even when it may have cost us more to run than it brought in either in produce or income, the Old Hyde Place was Dad’s escape from the city. Dad was never very comfortable as a city dweller.

So while the farm was never prosperous or even modestly productive, I do remember there came a time when Dad decided to make a major improvement to the place — not so much to enhance its viability as in its preservation as a distinguishable tract of land.

He decided to put a new fence around the entire 20 acres.

There are two things I can declare with certainty that would take place when Dad made a decision to act.

1. It would happen. Come hell or high water, as the saying goes, it would happen.

2. It would be done well.

Fencing a farm, even a mere 20-acre farm, is no small deal — certainly not in what was was probably the late 1950s. And the standard for a good fence in our part of the world was that it would be “hog tight, horse high and bull strong”. I distinctly remember that as the standard Dad used when he talked about our fence when it was completed. And, it remains the often quoted standard to this day.

I looked it up. It still is. And I’ll get to more about that in a moment.

Now, I’m almost certainly going to report far more details than anyone is interested in reading about on this topic, but bare with me. I’m inching ever so slowly to a meaningful point.

Our 20-acre farm was set out in a rectangle, more narrow along the front, where the one-and-a-half-lane dirt road ran by, and at the back. That configuration yields a perimeter of approximately 4,688 feet, about seven-tenths of a mile. So, that tells you how much woven wire fencing you will need. And if you are going to put three strands of barbed wire at the top, you will need a little over 14,000 feet of that.

In addition, if you are going to really make a fence that is hog tight, horse high and bull strong, the optimum distance apart for setting the fence posts is eight feet; which means you will need close to 500 fence posts. Also, I recall that Dad used much larger corner posts of approximately two feet in diameter that we set in concrete. I do not recall how many corner posts there were, but there were more than four — probably eight.

As for the posts themselves, Dad chose cedar, a wood respected for its superior strength, light weight, and resistance to weather and insects. He contracted with someone to have them cut to length, sharpened on one end and dropped at the farm in a huge pile beside the woven wire and barbed wire fencing.

You get the picture.

As this project commenced and after the corner posts had been set, we had a lot of material gathered in our barn yard just waiting for a plan of execution. And here it was. We would load a wagon with the posts, hitch the wagon to the John Deere, and pull up to the spot where a post would go.

Dad would mark the spot where I was to place the sharpened end of the post. I would hold the post very steady with both hands, while Dad — standing in the wagon and now considerably above me — would swing a 16-pound maul in a circle from the wagon floor, over his head and with all the force he could muster bring it down on top of the post I was holding with a thundering sound I can hear to this day.

Expletive shouted! And shouted again!

And he would do this repeatedly until the post was firmly embedded a couple of feet into the ground. Solidly in place. I never once had the courage to look up and watch as that maul head was making its inevitable arc toward the post and me.

I don’t know for sure how old I was when we started this project. I had to be old enough to be able to hold the post steady. But clearly I wasn’t old enough to say, “Hell no, I’m not doing that.”

Instead, that’s what my Dad said I was to do, and so I did. Close to 500 times I did that. With each post, he probably had to strike the post top ten times. That’s 5000 swings or so. Not once did Dad miss the post, nor hesitate in his swing. And not once did I doubt that his aim would be true.

That was my lesson in faith. Certainly faith in my father. But also, faith that something could be done well if gone at with care and clarity of purpose.

When all the posts were in place, we would use a block and tackle system to stretch the fence wire taunt from corner post to corner post and then nail it securely to the cedars.

And, when it was all done…man, when it was all done, it was a beautiful thing.

Like many things on the Old Hyde Place, there were lessons to be learned from fencing the farm. Take on the impossibly big projects in small parts. until you could see the end and then it was done. Build with quality products. And build to last.

I’m also pretty sure my standard for doing things well over a lifetime, whether it had anything to do with actual construction or not, was to make it hog tight, horse high and bull strong.

As a writer throughout a long career of developing position papers and speeches to make an argument that I hoped would be unassailable, I believed it needed to be hog high, horse tight and bull strong. And I suppose when I was sufficiently worked up about a topic, I would use the linguistic equivalent of a 16-pound maul to drive home my point.

When I look around today, I’m not sure where young people learn their life lessons. I’m grateful that I learned mine on the Old Hyde Place.

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