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Winter 2003

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Extended Family

Profile: Fond memories and an eye on the future
Edmund Keyes ’39

Chris O'Carroll




	“It was as clean as a house”: Edmund Keyes ’39 in the campus Horse Barn where he began his 70-year university connection (photo by Ben Barnhart)

HE MOVES SLOWLY NOW AROUND the few remaining farm buildings, leaning on a stout cane as he reminisces about flexing young muscles here back in the 1930’s – pitching hay, herding livestock, washing out the stables and all the other chores that were part of the daily routine on a campus that still gloried in a strong agricultural identity. Edmund Keyes (rhymes with “eyes”) graduated from Massachusetts State College in 1939. His was the first generation of the Keyes family to earn a diploma here, but when he labored in the school’s barns, fields and pastures, he was carrying on a three-generation family tradition.

Edmund’s grandfather, Mak Keyes, was the school’s head horseman. Mak had run his own farm in South Amherst, but after his wife’s death, he took the campus job and moved into a room near the stables. Edmund points up at a second-story window of what’s now Blaisdell House. “That was my grandfather’s room. He looked after all the horses, and in those days, you were talking about quite a few. There were six teamsters.”

Back then, a teamster drove not an 18-wheel truck, but a team of horses. One of the half-dozen teamsters working under Mak was his son, Clyde, Edmund’s uncle. When Uncle Clyde left to become an Amherst police officer, Edmund’s father, Pearl, quit an off-campus farm job and took over the head teamster’s position. Pearl eventually moved up to become foreman, then head farmer. By the end of his career, he had devoted 33 years to the college. He had even sacrificed a body part for the school, losing a finger one year as he fed corn into a chopper outside the dairy barn’s towering silo.

At first, Pearl commuted from his farm in Pelham, driving himself to work each day in a two-wheeled horse-drawn gig. But in the early 1930’s, he found a tenant for the Pelham home and moved his family into a campus farmhouse. That was when young Edmund began earning 25 cents an hour as a campus farmhand. “I had a job there every summer, and I worked every day after school. I started as a sophomore in high school and I worked all through college.”
The work brought him into contact with just about every aspect of the school’s agricultural enterprise. He made beds in a farmhands’ rooming house. He washed milking pails and cleaned out the stables. “It was as clean as a house almost.” He hefted the big metal cans full of milk into the ice water vats where they were stored overnight. “Then in the morning this guy came with a mule cart. He picked up all of this milk in his mule cart and he took it up to Flint Lab. Some of it was used in the dining halls, some of it was used to make cheese and ice cream.”
He weeded acres of carrots, corn and other crops. “Carrots you weeded on your hands and knees. You hoed corn. One cornfield had rows so long that when you started at 8 in the morning, when you got back at noon you’d just done two rows.”

At the start of every spring, he lent a hand with the annual cattle drive, moving a herd along the uphill route from winter quarters down by Commonwealth Avenue to a pasture up by East Pleasant Street. “We used to drive young stock from the dairy barn up across the pond, up Eastman Lane. We called it Lover’s Lane. That’s quite a way up there. It was a wild drive. We’d be just herding them on foot, chasing them like mad.”

On top of his farm chores and his studies, Edmund found time to earn a letter as a shortstop and third baseman for the Mass State baseball team. He still follows the fortunes of UMass sports teams, driving his truck to campus to attend football games and other contests.

Now a widower, he still lives in the Pelham farmhouse where he was born in 1916. He and his wife raised eight children, two of whom graduated from UMass, adding a fourth generation to the Keyes family’s university connection. And what about a fifth generation? His oldest grandchildren are currently in high school, so with all his fond memories of the school’s aggie past, he is also keeping an eye on the future.

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