A Missed Opportunity?

During the summer of 1942, I was notified that the farm was to be sold and I was asked if I wanted to buy it. There was no price put on it and I did not think I could afford it. So I told them I was not interested. I know now that it would have been a great bargain as the price would have been only ten or twelve thousand dollars. I had no idea how to finance a purchase of that kind and so I did not even consider it. Also I had decided to marry Claire in the fall of that year and I did not feel competent to take on any more worries or tasks right then. It was probably just as well or perhaps better because if I had bought that farm I might have been struggling to make a go of it for the rest of my life. I know now that I was not equipped either financially or educationally to make a good living at farming. I was trying to work the old way that farming was done a century earlier when everything was done by hand in the old slow and tedious way. That was all right in the old days when labor was cheap and plentiful but now everything must be done cheaply and quickly with expensive machinery and modern methods.
But I had not yet learned these facts. Instead, I looked around and soon found a smaller farm near Salfordville, about ten or twelve miles away. It was only thirty-seven acres and of course, that was not enough, but there was idle land nearby that I thought I could rent.