June 28, 1931
"A very hot heat wave last week followed by a terrific windstorm. I rode the bicycle to work in its fury with the tree tops lashing and showering dead limbs and twigs to the ground in the midst of blinding dust. Tonight we have had another cooling shower after a hot Sunday.
Will Huffelfinger came over tonight to look at my garden and I visited his. The 'yellows' are in both our cabbage patches. This disease has made it difficult to grow this vegetable and we do not know how to combat it. It appears as I grow older that these menaces are becoming worse. Is it but a natural consequence of an older civilization or is it that I am older and know more of them? Some years things are at their worst. I observe the Mexican bean beetle is scarce this year. I have only found two of them and one cluster of eggs while for the past three or four years they have amounted to a scourge - just myriads of them destroying the vines so many people pulled them up and burned them. Where they came from and why, and why they disappeared I do not know. Possibly people learned to kill them with poison or just a change of weather conditions.
Took the car and Ritz and Rowdy to Wills this morning. Rowdy loves the car and Ritz lies down and does not express his opinion. Dear old Rowdy sits solemnly on the seat enjoying the joy ride.
Fished awhile with Arthur in the canal without a catch. Visited with Cash a short time. Here an old chicken hen mother chased Ritzy after he chased her. That ball of feathers coming after the little cuss must have looked fierce to him judging from the disorderly retreat he made. I did not hear the locusts calling today. So their great love festival must be over for another seventeen years.
Crops are looking good. Corn is waist high with outstretched blades reaching to the shoulder in places. Alot of it is planted this year. I've had a long feast on strawberries. Cherries are abundant. I have a young tree off of which I picked a quart of what the birds left. I like cherries and plant a tree almost every year.
Came home from the country at noon, swept the cellar, puttered around the garden, fished awhile in the river - not a bite. Now it is eleven o'clock and time for little boys to go to bed.
First I must not forget to mention a boil on the front of my nearly bald head. It has set up there all week like a knot on a tree or I love to think of it as a miniature Vesuvius. It is subsiding and I hope soon the might eruption will be history."
June 28, 1931
D.C. Richards' Journal
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