Marry a farmer. Move to the Midwest. Raise a family in the sticks. Find happiness for life.
American agriculture is a repository of unlikely tales, none more seemingly implausible than that of Noelle Greathouse—a belle of New York City and daughter of Long Island, who traded blue-blood sophistication for black-dirt farmland.
Powered by a razor-sharp intellect, undergirded by incessant good cheer, obsessed by devotion to detail, and devoid of political correctness, Noelle, 86, barely stops for breath as she pours out a remarkable history: “Maybe it all started with a letter hidden in a bedroom drawer by a young girl. One thing for sure, there was no way I was going to marry a farmer, especially one growing corn and soybeans. No way. Nobody moves from New York City to an Illinois farm for life.”
Truly. Yet, life never moves in straight lines. Welcome to the grand adventure of the irrepressible Noelle Greathouse.
Best Laid Plans
Far removed from the crippling, bone-dry conditions that gripped much of farm country in the Dust Bowl era, Noelle was born Dec. 21, 1935, on the East Coast. Her mother, Marion Rich, was a refined Canadian nurse with a British bloodline—intent on taking tea at 5 p.m. each afternoon, rain or shine, and donning white gloves and a hat to church. Noelle’s father, Joseph Rich, was a perpetually tanned Ob-Gyn of Italian heritage and an autodidact blessed with a photographic memory.
Rich attended medical school at the University of Illinois, moonlighting as a nightclub piano player backed by a makeshift swing band to fund his education, along with pushing a janitor’s broom during every break from classwork. During WW2, Rich served as a colonel in the Seventh Army, in charge of medical operations during Operation Dragoon.
Noelle’s concrete memories of her father begin with his return from the European theatre of war: “My first real remembrance of my dad was at Grand Central Station,” she says. “A good-looking man with all these medals got off the train and my mother said, ‘This is your father.’”
Rich was indelibly imprinted by the rural lifestyle he had witnessed outside Champaign, Ill., during his time at university, and remained convinced that central Illinois—and not the bright lights of New York City—held the future for his daughter.
Throughout her grade school and high school years in Queens, one of the five boroughs of NYC, Noelle was kept on a short tether by the eagle-eyed Rich, who consistently steered his daughter toward the Prairie State.
“He told me over and over that I should marry an Illinois farmer and live on a farm and be a teacher,” Noelle recalls. “He said Midwest farmers were the warmest and best people out there, because they understood happiness and helped each other.”
However, she kicked against the possibility that the horizon held agriculture and teaching—both dismal prospects to a big city teenager. She clung to a farmers-are-rednecks stereotype, played out in the margins of notebooks during idle moments of high school (and college). “I used to copy Al Capp’s illustrations and I drew pictures of a hayseed farmer with a hat and grass in his mouth. I was determined to never even set foot in Illinois.”
Best laid plans.
Carlyle’s Cane
“Pack your bags. You’re going to Illinois.”
The words, spoken in the imperative by her father, stunned Noelle. Arriving home after work as a dental assistant at the end of summer 1953, following high school graduation, she was met at the door by the all-knowing stare of a parent exposing a ruse.
“Pack your bags,” Rich repeated. “And where is the letter?”
The “letter” referenced by Rich was a green light of admission to the University of Illinois. Months prior, Noelle had applied for admittance to placate her parents, but plucked the acceptance letter from the post, and hid the paperwork in the back of a bedroom drawer, almost succeeding in running out the clock.
“I was found out,” Noelle exclaims, wearing a wide grin. “I sure didn’t want to go to Illinois, but my dad had figured out the whole coverup.”
Because the previous weeks of summer had ticked by with no response, Rich telephoned the University of Illinois admissions office to register his concerns, only to be told Noelle had already been alerted in the affirmative by mail. Wasting no time, Rich booked airline tickets for Noelle and Marion, and the pair flew to Champaign, staying at the Inman Hotel for four days until dormitory space cleared.
Noelle dug in her heels: “Still wasn’t going to marry a farmer. No thank you.”
Enter Carlyle and his inappropriate cane.
Is He a Farmer?
With sights set on a business degree to thwart Rich, Noelle dove into her studies, avoiding all non-academic distractions—particularly the affectations of the opposite sex. By her junior year, Noelle had jumped tracks from business to art to foreign language, ultimately choosing education as a major and following Rich’s suggestion.
In the spring of 1956, during the traditional university mingles for students from fraternities, sororities, and independent housing, Noelle was assigned to set construction for an upcoming auditorium skit. During a work session, she proceeded to apply paint to a wooden backdrop, leaning over with a brush in hand, singularly focused on the set.
Into the auditorium, dressed to the nines in a white coat and straw hat, walking cane in hand, strode a preening peacock: Carlyle Greathouse, a west-central Illinois farmer from Hindsboro.
“I was up on stage, painting and minding my own business,” Noelle notes. “This guy, who seemed to think a lot about himself, walked up behind me and tapped me on the back with a cane.”
Carlyle’s memory is slightly more detailed. “I tapped her with my cane right on the butt,” he says. “She was painting and all I could see was her backside, and I really liked what I saw. I tapped her so I could see what she looked like from the front. When she turned around and I saw her, that was the moment I thought, ‘Wow. Now things are really picking up.’”
“Carlyle was a fire marshal, and he was standing there staring at me like he was big stuff in his fancy white coat,” Noelle says.
“I was big stuff,” Carlyle, 87, responds, his face lined with a wry grin, “but I never, never wanted another girlfriend after I spotted Noelle.”
It was a classic, show-stopping, boy-meets-girl moment: a life-changing collision of a 5’9” lean and handsome farm boy with an aw-shucks grin topped by dark brown hair, and a strikingly attractive NYC-bred teenaged girl with green eyes and sandy-blonde hair.
“That was the start of everything for us,” Noelle says. “We’d meet at the library to study, but Carlyle wasn’t interested at all in studying. I fell in love with a farmer and it was over.”
After several months, Noelle mustered the courage to call her protective father and tell him about her blossoming relationship with Carlyle.
“My dad was an old-school Italian and so strict, but he was a dad that truly loved me and watched over me. I dialed the phone and said, ‘Dad, I met someone.’”
The phone line went dead silent for the briefest blink before Rich answered: “Is he a farmer? Then it’s OK; I’d love to meet him.”
One-Way Haul
After completing degrees in agriculture and education, Carlyle and Noelle tied the knot with glowing approval from Rich in 1957. The middle-aged New York doctor and young-buck Illinois farmer could not have gotten on better. “Dr. Rich, and I always called him Dr. Rich, liked me the first time we met, probably more than he liked Noelle,” Carlyle says only half in jest, over a deep chuckle.
Searching for agriculture work, Carlyle initially leaned toward the cattle industry and won Reserve Grand Champion Steer and 4-H Grand Champion Steer at the North American International Livestock Expo (NAILE), earning him a $300-per month job offer from William Jacobson, a wealthy textile manufacturer with show cattle in New Milford, Conn.
Suddenly, life swung back to the East Coast for Noelle. “We lived in the loft apartment of a barn with animals underneath,” she describes. “Carlyle baled hay and worked with livestock, and I taught school. We lived in Connecticut for three years, and had both our daughters, Deborah and Darlene. I was introduced to farming in small ways and we were blissfully happy.”
Once again, despite her relative proximity, Rich looked beyond his daughter’s immediate status, and cast his eye toward Illinois. Bottom line: Rich wanted his daughter and son-in-law to own a farm in the Midwest. “I loved my job, but I was ready to have my own operation,” Carlyle says. “Dr. Rich encouraged me to watch for a farm back home, and one day my father called and said a neighbor was retiring. That was the boost we needed. Dr. Rich helped us finance our first farm in 1959 and we never looked back.”
The high stakes and the seismic change looming on a row crop farm were low hurdles for Noelle, according to Carlyle. “I was taking a New York City girl to farm and I knew there were going to be real challenges, but Noelle wasn’t just any girl—she was the perfect farming partner. She was exceptionally intelligent, so fun, so willing to do anything for our family, and so beautiful. Then again, maybe my wildest dreams didn’t capture just how well she would do. The farm became her life.”
Indeed. Noelle never lost sleep on a pillow of doubt. In 1960, she loaded a Chevrolet station wagon for a one-way haul west with two toddlers in tow and did not look back.
Hiawatha’s Disc
Nine hundred miles from her childhood home in New York City, Noelle sank roots on 160 acres of farmland, five miles down dirt and oiled roads outside the tiny town of Hindsboro, Ill., located 100 miles east of Springfield.
The sophisticated, big-city woman went “hayseed,” moving into an ancient, rickety farmhouse lined with green, asbestos shingles that welcomed snow between the crevices and into the house during winter. A wrap-around porch surrounded a groaning interior highlighted by an open kitchen connected to a large living room containing the house’s single source of heat: a potbellied oil stove that radiated warmth upstairs to the girls’ attic room.
It was a far cry from the finery of a doctor’s daughter in the Big Apple. No stores around the corner. No doctor down the block. No air conditioner. No running water. No bathroom.
Upon moving into the creaking structure, Carlyle hastily constructed a makeshift water closet, jamming a toilet beside a bathtub, without an inch of space to spare. The commode was technically functional but demanded a dignity fee—each user was forced to sit perch perpendicular on the seat, i.e., sideways on the pot.
“I’m not going to say that my new life wasn’t hard, but I didn’t look at it that way,” Noelle says. “It was just a series of new challenges. Hand-pumping water from a cistern was new and watching your clothes turn orange because of iron in the water was new, but guess what? I didn’t have to lock my doors and I felt freer than I ever had in my life surrounded by countryside, and I had Carlyle right beside me. Challenges, yes, but I couldn’t have been happier.”
Row crops were foreign; row crop machinery was alien. Noelle learned equipment name, purpose, and function from scratch. “One day, Carlyle had trouble with a Kewanee disc and asked me to go get a new part,” Noelle details. “I drove to the dealership, and asked, “Do you have parts for a Hiawatha? The salesman just kept looking at me like I was crazy, but I got the Indian names mixed up. It wasn’t my brightest moment, but I tried.”
The Hindsboro locals, particularly the Greathouse clan, embraced the new arrival. Noelle’s sisters-in-law, Chloanne and Sue, and her mother-in-law, Ruth, patiently offered tutorials in every rite-of-passage task. “They were wonderful to me and taught me to can, kill and dress a chicken, make ketchup, sew, make clothes, and so much more,” Noelle explains.
“I learned how to drive a tractor to cultivate a field, learned how to tend cattle, and I took pride in every step. It felt so good and I loved each aspect of farm activity. That was my life from then on: a giant learning experience. Yes, it was tough sometimes, but I learned how hard farm wives worked. You took care of a family and home, took meals to the field, and always felt the closeness of extended family. There was nothing like this in the city.”
Despite the big-hearted community, an outlier surfaced via a phone jab. Noelle and Carlyle’s residence was juiced to a party-line telephone: “One time, I picked up the receiver and heard this lady say, ‘How could Carlyle Greathouse marry a New Yorker?’” Noelle recalls, laughing at the memory. “Sure, I was different, but all the farming families were so good to me. I guess you can never win every single person over.”
How’s the Farm?
In the early 1960s, when 100 bushels of corn per acre was a fantastic yield, the Greathouse couple was running lean—no financial fat on the bone. Almost every penny earned was pumped back into the operation, Noelle notes: “I would say, ‘Carlyle, the kids need shoes. Do you think we can afford them?’ and he would answer, ‘Not this month. Maybe next month; let’s see how the crop does.’”
They followed the same frugal pattern with every purchase, whether small bits of land—or a television. “Our friends had gotten a color TV, and one of our girls asked, ‘Daddy, can we get a color TV?’ Carlyle said, ‘If it rains and the crop is good, we’ll get one.’ It rained. We got a color set. What a blessed life to stay within your means.”
Noelle padded the family pocketbook by teaching piano, a vital source of secondary income. However, in 1963, Carlyle spotted a full-time, kindergarten position in nearby Oakland, 10 miles southeast, and approached Noelle: “If you could teach for just five years, it would really help us buy this land.”
Noelle leaped at the opportunity and teaching became her off-farm calling. School during the day, piano lessons in late afternoon, and tractor work in the evening according to the season. Her success led to a beloved and high profile in Coles County—eclipsing native son Carlyle, who became known as “the husband of the kindergarten teacher.” The New York City girl had gone from outsider to cherished insider, playfully elbowing Carlyle to no-name status. Noelle became a 4-H leader, joined the Coles County Homemaker’s Extension, and canned fruit and vegetable until her pantry space revolted.
The five-year teaching window proposed by Carlyle turned into 44 stellar years in education. (In addition, Noelle earned a masters education from Eastern Illinois University in 1970, and a doctorate in elementary education from Indiana State University in 1991.)
“I loved every single minute of teaching over four decades,” Noelle says. “All those years in teaching proved my dad was right. There is no doubt: I am my father’s daughter.”
In 1977, as Rich’s health failed, Noelle and Carlyle traveled to the East Coast to say a final goodbye to a prescient father who largely was responsible for the couple’s happiness in Illinois. When the Greathouses entered the hospital room, Rich’s countenance flickered bright as he recognized his daughter and son-in-law, mustered the strength to sit up in bed, and uttered the last words of his life: “How’s the farm?”
Falling Off a Mountain
At the end of the 1960s, Noelle and Carlyle participated in the Tractor Drive of 1969—the first cross-country farmer protest to call for parity and take to the streets of Washington, D.C. The 1969 Drive originated in Redmon, Ill., with 150 farmers preceding the more well-known tractorcades of the 1970s.
Carlyle drove a suspect, yellow 1950 Minneapolis-Moline tractor one breakdown away from the iron cemetery. However, on the Drive’s first day, Noelle took the wheel and then returned home after several days to look after Deborah and Darlene, feed cattle, and teach summer classes at Eastern Illinois University. “I was so proud of Carlyle and wanted to do everything to help and support him. Driving the tractor for the first day or staying in Hindsboro to take care of the home, I was willing to do anything for him. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know it was going to almost end in disaster.”
Carlyle is the single most unlikely surviving member of the 1969 Tractor Drive. By all eyewitness accounts, he should have died on the trip—smashed against a West Virginia mountainside. In the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, just outside Wheeling, W.V., the tractor caravan pulled off the highway to a rest area and crawled toward a trailer park up a thin ribbon of a mountain road separated from a precipitous drop by a rickety fence. Tractors to his front, Carlyle was positioned in the middle of the pack, with Oakland growers Jim and Mary Taylor in a pickup truck directly to his rear.
As the procession halted, his brakes failed. “If you know that tractor, then you know those brakes don’t hold going backward—only forward. I started rolling down, headed right for Jim and Mary.”
Eyeballing the fence, Carlyle steered the Minneapolis-Moline toward the barrier, intending to catch the rear left-wheel on a post, and prevent a collision. After a lifetime on a farm and in a tractor seat, Carlyle’s driving skills were spot-on: The rear left-wheel caught dead-center.
For a fraction of a frozen second, all was well—until the post snapped.
Carlyle rocketed over the edge. “At the very first, I rolled into pasture and thought I might just be able to turn the tractor around to break the momentum.”
No chance. Too steep and fast. Jump or die.
The tractor careened to its side, forcing Carlyle to leap off the back just before the vehicle cartwheeled down the mountain, flinging shrapnel as it tumbled 150 yards. At the bottom of a precipitous ravine, the hull was a deathtrap.
“I suppose it was a miracle I survived and was pretty much unhurt,” Carlyle says. “A local farmer heard about it and offered $50 for the tractor. More accurately, he paid $50 for the tires. Even after all these years, I’d guess some of the remains are still there, rusting away.”
Immediately following the accident, Oakland farmer Max Miller raced for a telephone to call Noelle, who was unaware of the accident. “Ignore any news you hear,” Miller said, “because Carlyle is still alive. Other than falling off a mountain, your husband is fine.”
Concrete and Dirt
To the present day, Noelle motors at full-bore, her zeal for life undaunted by age. She hits the ground running at 5:30 a.m. each day, in a farmhouse built several years past the green, asbestos beast. (Noelle’s mother, Marion “Monnie” Rich, later moved to Illinois and spent 25 years in the Greathouse residence and grew to “love farm life.”)
Across 86 years, Noelle has kept crosshairs trained on the simplicities of life—the key to her long-term happiness and deep satisfaction on the farm. “Noelle was so detail-oriented and always did her best to push for perfection in anything she did,” Carlyle says. “She never let ‘good enough’ into her vocabulary and insisted things in her life were either right or wrong. And when they were wrong, she gave everything to make them right.”
Carlyle’s devotion to his wife is returned two-fold by Noelle: “I’m a farmer’s wife. Illinois is my home. The truth is I could have been happy farming anywhere, making a home anywhere, and teaching anywhere in the Midwest, but I had to have Carlyle beside me, the greatest man a girl could dream of.”
Six-plus decades after leaving Long Island in the rearview mirror, how did the New York City girl do in Illinois agriculture? “She’s been on the farm for 65 years and married to the happiest farmer in the world,” Carlyle says. “That should answer the question.”
Dr. Joseph Rich raised a daughter on NYC concrete to provide her with a life in Illinois dirt—the inverse of conventional reasoning.
“Ultimately this was God’s plan for me,” Noelle says. “My father was the impetus He used to get me here. I pray every night to thank Him for the blessings of my family and the blessing of my farm life.”
“My father always told me I could not have a better life than being a farmer’s wife and being a teacher,” Noelle adds. “My father was right.”
To read more stories from Chris Bennett (cbennett@farmjournal.com — 662-592-1106), see:
Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market
Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.
Bagging the Tomato King: The Insane Hunt for Agriculture’s Wildest Con Man
How a Texas Farmer Killed Agriculture’s Debt Dragon
While America Slept, China Stole the Farm
Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years
The Arrowhead whisperer: Stunning Indian Artifact Collection Found on Farmland
Where’s the Beef: Con Artist Turns Texas Cattle Industry Into $100M Playground
Fleecing the Farm: How a Fake Crop Fueled a Bizarre $25 Million Ag Scam
Skeleton In the Walls: Mysterious Arkansas Farmhouse Hides Civil War History
US Farming Loses the King of Combines
Ghost in the House: A Forgotten American Farming Tragedy
Rat Hunting with the Dogs of War, Farming’s Greatest Show on Legs
Misfit Tractors a Money Saver for Arkansas Farmer
Government Cameras Hidden on Private Property? Welcome to Open Fields
Farmland Detective Finds Youngest Civil War Soldier’s Grave?
Descent Into Hell: Farmer Escapes Corn Tomb Death
Evil Grain: The Wild Tale of History’s Biggest Crop Insurance Scam
Grizzly Hell: USDA Worker Survives Epic Bear Attack
Farmer Refuses to Roll, Rips Lid Off IRS Behavior
Killing Hogzilla: Hunting a Monster Wild Pig
Shattered Taboo: Death of a Farm and Resurrection of a Farmer
Frozen Dinosaur: Farmer Finds Huge Alligator Snapping Turtle Under Ice
Breaking Bad: Chasing the Wildest Con Artist in Farming History
In the Blood: Hunting Deer Antlers with a Legendary Shed Whisperer
Corn Maverick: Cracking the Mystery of 60-Inch Rows
