Carlin Shank used to sell fat hogs to my dad. A retired Air Force veteran, Carlin returned home in the 1970s from Southeast Asia hoping to secure a farm loan. He would learn there wasn’t a bank in Wayne County, Indiana, that would help him. The stated reason was that returning vets typically failed at farming. Still, having grown up on an Indiana dairy farm in the throes of the Great Depression, Carlin was no agrarian greenhorn.
Borrowing $10,000 from his mother, he purchased some Poland China sows, a Hampshire boar and some portable buildings. He went to raising hogs. Around here, they used to call hogs the “rent payers and mortgage lifters.”
By the time my wife, our four children and I moved to Wayne County back in 1994, Carlin was an established cattleman. He was the quintessential Indiana farmer. To look at him, you’d never thought he had a dime. He was a man void of airs and duplicity. Always keen for a bargain, he once told me how he hated it when our family’s packing house shut down in ’78.
“You could buy those broken hot dogs they sold to the farmers for next to nothing,” as he put it.
Last week, with a reefer load bound for northern Indiana, I passed by the Quaker churchyard near my Wayne County home. Glancing over, I saw Carlin’s sons, among others, bearing his casket to its final resting place. The cause of death was COVID-19.
Carlin was welcoming to us when we first moved to the Indiana countryside. Always cordial, and a great neighbor. He was 87.
I got parked up at the usual spot and Denise swung by to pick me up. It would be a rare home-cooked meal. Having about an hour to play with, I wondered whether we should swing by the churchyard and pay our respects. Denise had been told the funeral was a “family only” event, due to the pandemic. About the time lunch was over, a text came in from Shoestring Waugh. A mutual friend, John Runyon, had also died of COVID-19.
