My father was Donald James MacFarlane. He was born on July 3rd, 1903 in the same farmhouse his father (William Daniel MacFarlane) was born in 30 years earlier. The farmhouse is about 10 miles east of Janesville, where my great grandfather emigrated from Scotland in 1849.
My father went to school in Janesville, and then went on to get a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin. From there he moved to New Jersey and worked for the Standard Oil Company. He was transferred to Beaver, Pennsylvania – and that is where he met my mother.
One of my father’s younger brothers, Kenneth MacFarlane had attended the New York Game Commission’s Game Bird School and he imported some pheasant eggs in 1928 from an English game farm call Gaybird Game Farm. Kenneth called his new enterprise the MacFarlane Pheasant Farm.
In 1934 my father developed a medical condition related to his exposure to fumes from the refinery he worked at and he and my mother decided to move to Janesville with the idea from my father would work alongside Kenneth at the pheasant farm. In 1940 my uncle Kenneth died from exposure during an event call the Armistice Day Blizzard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armistice_Day_Blizzard). My father bought his brother’s share of the farm from Kenneth’s widow Gwen.
My siblings were born as follows, Marion 1937, Janet 1941, Marj 1943 and Kenneth 1945. In 1945 my parents took a trip to Montana. On the drive home they passed through Duluth, Minnesota. They ate a roadside restaurant – only to later find out that the cook at that restaurant was contagious with polio. My father nearly died from polio – he was in an iron lung for a period of time. When he recovered – he was a paraplegic for the rest of his life (he used a wheelchair and could only walk with braces and crutches). Think about my mother finding out that her husband was deathly ill, and her children were 8, 4, 2 and an infant.
My father ran the office end of the business from then on, and my mother’s brother James Adamson ran the production end of the farm (I’ll write about him – he was like my 2nd father). I believe one of the reasons my father built such a successful day-old chick business was because he was so available to answer the phone (and talk to people who were having problems or had questions about their day old chicks).
I am going to stop at this point – and will write about my father’s life after polio soon.
