The Roths

By John G. Taylor

I’ve been an escape artist all career, conjuring while working hermit’s hours, writing headlines at midnight and questioning reporters about their stories as they were home sucking their second beers calling you a party-pooping drudge.

I’ve scratched out unpaid book reviews. I started a sports-shooting column never having hunted. I earned pizza money by personally taste-testing wet and dry dog foods.

The concentric circles of my writing world included “vacationing” with my wife and infant daughter as I sampled working on a small, family run dairy farm, 170 miles northwest of Milwaukee.

Thanks to Arlene and Dick Roth, dairy farming indelibly infused my DNA, nose to toes, draining my Brooklyn innocence about brown cows and chocolate milk.

Within minutes of arriving at Roth Acres, I clung to my ersatz seat, a beat-up back wheel cover atop a furiously product-hurling manure spreader that Dick was piloting till the engine quit.

The drama required Dick, about 15 years my senior, to jump down and race for whatever our rescue was, stranding me in the afternoon summer sun ambience of my screwball idea’s rewards, swatting flies and breathing through my teeth.

I invented new employment for the phrase “cow shit.” And I imagined newsroom pals judging me so full of BS that I broke the BS-throwing machine. I’d correct them, of course, as these were cows, with no bulls involved when I was spectator.

I hope to God there will always be family farms like Roth Acres where kids are called “young stock,” Jell-O is a cake ingredient, and where cake, pie and ice cream are always to be had --- where the universal response to “How are you doing?”  is “Keepin’ goin’.”

We visited twice in the late 1970s as new parents. Next, Dick and Arlene diverted to our Fresno home while on a Farm Bureau trip. The last Taylor visit was late winter 1997, with son Corey for his first visit and a return for once-baby Erin.

Arlene jump-started this near 50-year friendship.

She said “you betcha” when the Farm Bureau called about a journalist who wanted a trial marriage with dairying.

Arlene had been a rookie herself once, marrying into a long-time dairy family that brought her, as a city girl from the college town of Stevens Point, population of about 23,000 in the 1970s, to the Portage County village of Junction City with 300 souls.

She was clueless about dairy life but relentless in learning and then promoting the dairy industry. She persuaded Dick to welcome this tinhorn stranger from a hometown of about 3 million, his wife and their fussy infant. I think he relished when Bossie cleaned my face with her tail.

The Roth motto was proclaimed on a living room needlepoint: “The Love in Your Heart Wasn’t Put There to Stay. Love Isn’t Love till It’s Given Away.”

Dick was laconic, forever in motion – cows don’t take milking holidays. Arlene was quick to respond to a crisis, instill a hearty laugh or tell a fast talker like me “I don’t know about you.”

Here’s what I wrote to prepare my adult kids for our visit just after the Packers beat the New England Patriots to win Super Bowl XXXI:

“We’ll haul ourselves out of bed at 3 a.m. We’ll immediately shovel cow manure. Next, cart around wheelbarrows of feed. Then milk about 75 of these chained-up critters. After we de-grunge, probably about 7, we’ll scarf down breakfast and catch a quick nap. Twelve hours later, we’ll do it again.”

Dick and Arlene were always present in the moment, faithful to God, dutiful to the needs of their stock and carrying heartfelt responsibility to improve the well-being of their neighbors best they could. To be clear, all the world was their neighbor.

They experienced joy in the births and baptisms of grandchildren and sudden tragedy, from cancer and  COVID, loved ones taken far too young. They fought off those who wanted a highway cut through their property, yelled for and at the Packers, and helped newcomers from southeast Asia get resettled in the Badger State.

None of these insights were not top of mind when Dick invited me to grab a rope and help birth a calf one night or when I guess I was supposed to stare down an escaped cow while Dick figured on how to get it back through a hole in a barbed wire fence.

I wasn’t yelling with profound happiness when a horsefly chased me from the shade, when I yanked a tick from daughter’s neck, slipped down a near-vertical staircase in the dark to reach the only restroom or helped my son push home a snowmobile that crapped out in the whiteout of a cornfield.

This was a unique refuge where your surprise Christmas present might be a new lime spreader to keep the barn walkways clean. It was a place where Arlene’s sister, a Catholic nun, gifted her a “Dammit Doll” to safely launch at the TV when the Packers faltered.

Here’s what I wrote in the Fresno Bee:

“Leaving was like slamming the door on your fingers or running naked into the 15-degree air.

“I groped for some reassurance that there would be another hike back up the dirt road to the two towering blue silos.

“I recalled the notations Arlene had made on her calendar: ‘March 10: Counted 6 Canada geese overhead. March 13: Saw hawk, got 20 inches of snow. March 23: A flock of juncos (snowbirds) came through.

“Nature and tenderness. The bedrock of trips and friendships. Daughter Erin said: ‘We’re leaving paradise.’ ”

That mirrored Arlene’s view: “I see something new every day, every season. If you took me away from here, I’d go out of my mind. I wouldn’t want my life any other way.”

My lesson: You must reach outside -- sometimes far outside -- your comfort zone to understand yourself and how best you can change the world.