Sewing seeds of kindness, Everett Rau is helped by friends
Bringing in the sheaves, so fair-goers can learn the old ways



GUILDERLAND — Squinting his eyes against the amber glow of the evening’s setting sun, Everett Rau surveys his wheat field and stoops to inspect the underside of an 1885 reaper binder.
"We’re trying to rush it," he says. "It shouldn’t be cut for a week yet."
Friends have come to help Rau harvest his crop in time for the Altamont Fair. "It’s like the old days, where neighbors help neighbors in need," said Rau, who had an accident on the farm earlier this summer.
The feeling is mutual. "Everett is Everett," said 22-year-old Kevin Stewart, a friend who came to help with the harvest. "You can always count on him," he said.
A mechanic, Stewart has learned how to use the antique farm equipment by "reading books and spending time in the field with Everett," he said. The wheat that they harvest will be used in demonstrations of old farming equipment at the fair.

Now in his ninth decade, his back bowing to time, Rau remembers what it was like in the first quarter of the century, when he was a boy on the same Settles Hill farm.
A dog named Rex was his constant companion, he said later from a rocking chair in the living room of a house that has held generations. Looking across the braided rug in the center of the room, to his wife, he said, "Every dog we’ve had, probably 15 of them, have been named Rex." Neither of them knew why.
Rau was the seventh boy born to his parents, and he was one of three who lived to maturity. "It was tough times back then," he said.
He barely made the lucky triplet, though. After 14 years of ear problems and strep throats, Rau was walking to a Christmas party in Altamont from his family’s Lainhart Road homestead when he began to feel sick. "I became quite ill over there and walked back home," he said. "A couple of days later, Dr. Collins told me I had scarlet fever."
The doctor would come to the house with a black bag, he said; it held a dozen glass tubes, filled with mysterious medicines. "It was already warm weather before I was good enough to walk outside," said Rau.

Some of the toughest times, though, passed him by. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Rau’s older brother, Raymond, bought a tractor and the two of them planted the farm with buckwheat.
"I was really taken aback to read the newspapers," he said. "Businessmen were actually jumping out of skyscrapers, there were soup kitchens, but I was eating ample."
During those years, his uncle Willard fell on hard times and came back to live on the family farm, Rau said. The pair raised 77 pigs together, and sold them for seven cents a pound. "That’s $14 per pig," he said.
The next year, they bought an old, commercial-grade meat grinder and sold some pork as sausage, he said. "Every old farmer had recipes," said Rau. "It was basically salt, pepper, and sage."

The Great Depression was different for his wife, Peg, who grew up in Scotia. Life was hard for a while, she said, but she brightens at the memory of meeting her husband. In 1942, they were both working at General Electric, she in the payroll division and he in research and development. She would wonder about the handsome man who walked past her desk every day to punch in, so she checked his clock card to figure him out, she said. At noon one day, she went to the restaurant where he worked the register and the two had lunch together; they haven’t stopped talking since.
"Our first date was in August of ’42; I got my ring at Christmas of ’42; and I married him in June of ’43," Mrs. Rau said without looking up from her knitting.

When she arrived at the farm as a new bride, there was no phone and no running water; those conveniences wouldn’t come for another five years at least.
"When you love somebody enough, you’ll do anything just to have the love of that person," she said of making the adjustment. The couple shared the home with Rau’s mother, who was there to see the births of her four grandchildren.
Rau wouldn’t return to farming until his retirement. He owned a business and sold construction equipment in the interim, but, he said, "My mind was never out of farming because of my childhood."
Before he was 12, during a storm in late January, Rau’s father told him to give the pigs more hay. "I took three or four forkfuls and put it in the pigpen," he said. "The little pigs put their noses right under it and crawled underneath like a blanket." That single act, in 10-degree weather, built his character towards animals, he said.
"I had such a warm feeling after I did that," he said, "when I crawled into my feather bed, I never forgot it."