Proud Farm Family Comes to Grips With a Bizarre Tragedy That Wiped Out 5 Men

MENOMINEE, Mich. —  On the first day without wakes or funerals since the tragedy, children are running in the farmyard, spraying each other with a garden hose while their mothers shout for them to cut it out.

It would be a normal day but for one thing. Elmbrook, the dairy farm nurtured by five generations of Theuerkauf men over 108 years, has no one to run it save for the widows and children.

Inside the great white farmhouse, Linda Theuerkauf and her children gather in a circle, surrounded by memories, and say the names:

“First Tom . . . “

Tom Theuerkauf, 27, was the first one into the manure pit, through a narrow hole and down the ladder to clear the drain 12 feet below.

” . . . then Danny . . . “

Dan Theuerkauf, 15, quiet and thoughtful like his uncle Tom, had been cutting hay by himself for two years, already part of the circle of Theuerkauf farmers. Dan saw Tom’s head hit the ladder and slip into the dark. He sent his 8-year-old brother Brian for help and then went down.

” . . . and Brian got Bill first.”

Bill Hofer, 63, was the third man down, a cousin who grew up across the lane from the Theuerkaufs, went to school with them and farmed with them.

” . . . and I got my Grandpa . . . “

Carl Theuerkauf Sr., 66 the day they buried him, a patriarch with a love for farming surpassed only by his passion for his family. He hated nothing more than when people wouldn’t try, yet he once stopped Carl Jr. from running into a burning barn to save the cows, the farm equipment, the new tractor.

Dorothy Theuerkauf remembers her son said: “ ‘Spray me down Dad and I’ll go in.’ . . . Carl said: ‘No way, don’t risk your life for machines.’ ”

Carl Sr. stepped into the hole to save his son, grandson and cousin.

” . . . and then my Carl.” Linda finishes the toll.

Carl Theuerkauf Jr., 37, was the last man down.

“I don’t know where he came from,” Linda said. “He wasn’t supposed to be on the farm that day.”

At first no one knew what had happened. Men went into that pit every week to clear the drain before the pump was turned on. But methane from the decaying sewage had built up during a heat wave; it took only seconds for each man to collapse, scant minutes to suffocate in air that contained no oxygen.

The automatic waste pit was one innovation cited in 1981 when Michigan State University named Carl Sr. the state Farm Manager of the Year.

Over five generations, the Theuerkaufs (pronounced Turk-off) built Elmbrook into the largest and most respected dairy farm in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Gain the Theuerkaufs’ trust and you had the ear of every farmer for 50 miles. Lose it, as one state ag man did, “and your word is dirt,” a county agent said.

As their lives touched Menominee County, so did their July 26 deaths. Newspapers carrying stories of the family sold out and people stood by the road in the rain when the funeral procession passed. Not since more than 700 people celebrated Elmbrook’s centennial a year ago July was there such a gathering.

Carl Sr. was so proud of that centennial he was near tears at the county fair last year when they handed him the historical marker. This year, the fair was deserted, what with the funerals and the rain.

The same gloom hung over Elmbrook. A cow was loose in the back field. Two newborn calves lay untended in the mud of a holding pen. Thick, wet muck coated the stall floors in the dairy barn.

No longer is Elmbrook a tight ship farmed by committee, Carl Sr. and sons Tom and Carl Jr. meeting in the yard every morning, hands on hips, debating the day’s work sometimes for an hour.

Missing from those meetings was Carl Sr.’s third boy, Bill, a woodworker, not a farmer. Carl once said he could handle anything, so long as it wasn’t a death, but he cried three years ago when he learned Bill had lost his hands in a car crash.

Elmbrook still needs running. The pit, still waiting to be emptied, sits like a vault beneath the dairy barn and nobody will go near it.

Bill, just 23 but aged incredibly, it seems, these past weeks, is taking a crash course in his family’s occupation, scrambling between the paid hands and neighbors who volunteered to help. What are you doing? What must be done there?

That doesn’t stop one of those raucous water fights with wet, laughing Theuerkauf children everywhere. They splash each other like they did just the Sunday before, when their fathers and brother were throwing water too.

That’s the kind of thing the Theuerkaufs are keen to remember.

There are the Sunday mornings, when Linda made waffles and Carl Jr. would poke fun at her cooking. “Tasteless, tasteless,” he would say.

Sunday Drives

There are the Sunday afternoons, when Carl and Linda drove alone to see the cornfields and Carl would talk of plans for the future, the family, the farm.

“How Carl loved the farm. His dream was to make it the best farm it could be, so we could be together,” Linda said.

After the ambulances and the television crews, Linda awoke in the dark. It was the hour Carl would be getting up, and she walked across the yard to the bright lights of the barn. “I stood and watched the man milk the last six cows. It was 3 a.m. and I felt Carl there with me.”

She smiled. “Do I hate the farm because of what happened? No.”

But that night after they died, Linda hated Elmbrook. “I just wanted to pack and move away and never come back.”

In the trailer next door, 5-year-old Tommy promises Tom’s widow, Wendy, he will take care of her. Two-year-old Rachael cries. At night, Tom’s pet German shepherd whines softly. “Even the dog is lost,” Wendy said.

She doesn’t know if she will stay. “I have to see what my kids say.” What is the farm to them now? Pain? Love?

Farming and Elmbrook remain life and love for Carl Jr.’s children. The oldest, 16-year-old Becky, sees her father and her brother Dan in the work of the farm hands.

From a sandbox in the yard, Brian plotted how he and Dan would run their own dairy operation. Brian tucked a toy tractor into Dan’s coffin, and the Saturday they buried his big brother, he begged to go home in time to turn on the TV wrestling shows “so I can tell Danny about it.”

Candle Wish

Dan had wished for such a brother on the candles of a birthday cake; a pregnant Linda guessed it. “I said: ‘You wished for a baby brother,’ and he started crying. He said if somebody knows your wish, it won’t come true.”

Linda and her children are crowded together on the couch, passing a rose and a carnation, two flowers saved from the funeral the day before. On the wall above hangs a portrait of Elmbrook, painted long ago by a relative.

For an afternoon, Brian, Becky, 12-year-old Tracy and 10-year-old Carrie sit with Linda and tell warm, funny stories.

. . . Dad’s California vacation that turned out to be tours of farms. . . .

. . . How Grandpa would drive around lost, never asking directions, filling the car with cigar smoke until it seemed the journey would never end. . . .

. . . Danny’s favorite joke: Why did they outlaw round bales of hay? Because cows couldn’t get a square meal.

“What was your father’s favorite song?” Linda asks. They sing:

“Sugar in the morning, sugar in the evening, sugar at suppertime. Be my little sugar and love me all the time.”

Linda laughs, pulling dark hair back from her face to show not tear-swollen misery but twinkling eyes. “He sang that to me all of the time . . . and he had a rotten singing voice.”

They laugh and laugh. Then Becky asks the question:

“Why, why did he have to go down?”