Farm Sale Marks the End of an Era for John and Flo Hampel

Written By John Hampel

Here are a few comments on our recent farm sale, which was held on February 8th.  It was a perfect sale day with cloudy skies and a wind from the northeast with a temperature of 40 to 45 degrees.  The wind blowing from a northeasterly direction served two purposes.  First, the cow lot was down wind so the people didn't have to smell the cattle corrals that day.  The second nice thing about the northeast wind was that we have good wind breaks from the northeast around our farmstead.  We were thankful for the wind direction.

The sale started right on time at 9:00 A.M. that morning and ended about 4:00 P.M. that afternoon.  The crowd was unusually large.  The auctioneer, Larry Geifer, stated it was the largest crowd of people at a farm sale that he had ever witnessed.  My only comment about the crowd is that advertising pays.   Jerome Gerber, Flo, and I spent a fairly good sum of money on advertising for the sale.  I failed to mention at the start of this note that Jerome Gerber, which is Bishop Gerber's brother, brought his machinery to our place and we had the sale together.  You can see that pooling our machinery together was good for both of us.

I can't leave out the St. Louis Altar Society of Waterloo which served the lunch at the sale.  You can imagine the food that it took to feed a crowd of about 1,000 people.  The ladies started the day having coffee, pop, doughnuts, ham sandwiches, cookies, chili, chips, and pie.  They started with six electric roasters of chili, 375 ham sandwiches, and 63 pies.  I didn't eat until about 1:30 in the afternoon and by then, they were out of chili and ham sandwiches.  The ladies made two trips to Kingman to get bread and ham for the sandwiches.  When everyone left, they had 4 pieces of pie and a very, very small amount of ham and bread left.  You can image how hard those ladies had to work.  The lunch was served in our house garage, so they had an excellent place to work.

As everyone knows, Flo and I are building a house in Wichita.  We were there yesterday and they were to start digging the basement today [02/24/93].  I doubt that they started because of the light rain that is falling.  Our house should have been started some time ago but it has been too wet to dig the basement.  So one of these days it will quit snowing and raining and then they can really get on with the house.

(This story was written in 1993.)