I Am A Haiglerite!

I sometimes get those forwarded emails that you all receive. I try not to pass them on unless they are something that really strikes me as important, very interesting or very funny. I got a really good one today about immigrants, which I'm not going to post here, because I want to keep this blog about Haigler and the memories that it invokes. But the subject of "Immigrants" got me to thinking about the people we rubbed shoulders with when we were putting up hay or cutting wheat in the hot summer days, cutting silage, picking corn in the crisp fall or who we called when we were having trouble with a heifer birthing her first calf or got a tractor stuck in the muddy muck of the three corners area of northwest Kansas/southwest Nebraska/eastern Colorado.

The people around Haigler when I was growing up were those kind of neighbors that you could count on to help if you needed it and weren't afraid to ask for help if they needed it.

Some of them were first generation immigrants and some were descended from people who sailed on the Mayflower. They were a mixture of Democrats, Republicans, Independents and those who choose not to register with any political party. Methodists, Lutherns, Baptists, Catholics, Holiness, Seventh-day Adventist.

They were a MIX of hundreds of countries, creeds and ethnicity. They were/are FRIENDS!

They took care of each other. (Sometimes teased each other, made fun of each other, fought with each other), but they took care of each other!

They came from Germany, England, Ireland, Some of them came back with their new husbands from Japan, Italy and Russia. They supported each other, they married each other, they grew up together. They settled the plains country!

I am proud to have lived in the Haigler community and to call myself a "Haiglerite."