MUSCODA - The talking heads on our television set were discussing the rising prices for gasoline, diesel fuel, natural gas, L-P gas, electricity – all things we need in our vehicles and homes that make our current life-styles possible.

When I looked at Vi and asked: “What do you suppose the cost for a bushel of corn cobs would be now?”- she knew exactly what I meant. One of her kid-chores on the farm was going to the nearby cob shed to bring back a basket of corn cobs to feed the big iron “kitchen range” that did double duty - cooking food and producing heat.

The early-morning kitchen could be a popular spot for adults and kids to gather. Many two-story farm houses at that time had no heat in upstairs bedrooms other than a small in-the-floor grate that permitted some warmth to travel up from the room below. The REA had not yet arrived to bring electricity, with its heaters and fans.

Corn cobs were often the desired morning fuel because they produced a quick fire that started warming the house and the coffee. Cobs were also the likely heat source for both the room and water warmth for many Saturday night baths that took place in the kitchen, using a portable metal tub and hand-carried hot water.

But going to the cob shed was not something Vi looked forward to, fearing she might encounter such things as scurrying mice or crawling spiders.

The cobs were a bi-product of picking and shelling the corn that was raised and either sold for cash or fed to livestock. That was a time when corn ears were picked in the field by hand – one ear at a time – or by a new-fangled snapper machine that was pulled behind a tractor and picked one or two rows of corn as it moved through the field. The current multi-row combine harvesting of corn had yet to be invented.

At that time harvested corn on the cob was stored in corn-cribs made of wood or wire and then fed to livestock or kept until a big custom corn-shelling machine arrived to separate the grain from the cobs.

Often neighbors gathered to do the shelling job – similar to the threshing crews who worked together during the summer oat harvest. Shelling was work, but it was also a social event.

Many of the cobs produced were burned in stoves on the farms, especially in the prairie areas where firewood-producing trees were not always closely available.

Some cobs were marketed. I recall a giant cob pile in our village near the railroad tracks. My dad took a photo of that pile – which he named “Mount Cob”- and sold it to the “Omaha World-Herald.”

Corn cobs weren’t the only home-grown fuel of the open prairie. Early settler homes were sometimes heated by burning buffalo chips (dried buffalo manure) or, later, by cow chips. An old rancher, who had once lived with his wife in a chip-heated sod home in the Nebraska sandhills, told my brother: “My wife and I didn’t see much of each other during the winter. Cow chip fires were hot but they produced a lot of ashes. During the winter we sort of met in the doorway – I would be carrying in the cow ships and she would be carrying out the ashes!”

However, he noted an advantage of the sod houses, with their thick walls, was they were cool during the summer.

Vi and I had the opportunity to visit that old sod house. By then the owners were using it mostly as a summer get-a-way. The structure had glass windows and painted inside walls. About the only noticeable difference from many small cabins was the thickness of the window-sills where you could perch to watch the outside world.