OFI 984: Almost Catching A Train In California

Published: Feb. 2, 2021, 7:30 a.m.

Today I’ve got a story for you all that I think illustrates a point about goal setting. As I have talked about, many times in the past, I grew up in a very small town in the Central Valley of California called Valley Home.  It is a tiny, triangular shaped farming town north of Oakdale and east of Escalon.  It lies right in the northern sliver of Stanislaus County where the county seat is Modesto.     Valley Home was originally named Clyde, when a tiny train stop of the Southern Pacific Railroad was created between Stockton and Oakdale in 1871.  Clyde remained just a small stopping point for the railroad until about 1903 when a bunch of German immigrants moved to the area and created a settlement.     Chief among these immigrants was FD Volkman, and the house I grew up in had actually been purchased from his family by my parents in 1972.  FD convinced the railroad to build a depot there, and this led to many other German’s settling the area and starting farms.     There happened to be another train stop nearby that was also called “Clyde”, and that was plenty of pre-text for the townspeople to call for a name change to the town.  They renamed the settlement “Thalheim”.  When you translate “Thalheim” from German to English it means “home in the valley”.     This all went along very well until about 1914 until a little conflict in Europe, that we now call World War I, broke out.  As anti-German sentiment built in the United States the residents felt the pressure to not have such a German sounding name.  At the same time, they loved their new country and wanted to demonstrate their patriotism.  So, the decision was made to change the name of the town to its English translation, and the town was named “Valley Home”.  That is the name that this small farming community still bares today.     I talk about Valley Home frequently on the Off-Farm Income Podcast as a large part of my heart remained there when I was forced to take up residence in the City Of Modesto at age 14.  So much so, that we call our current farm in Kuna, Idaho “Thalheim Acres”.  However, instead of raising cattle in the Central Valley Of California as I always thought I would, we now raise them in the Treasure Valley of Idaho.  Never the less, we have our home in the valley, and we love it and swell with pride when we talk about it.     I’m telling you this story about Valley Home in large part because I like to tell stories about the place in which I grew up.  But, to make the point I want to make about goal setting in today’s episode I want to tell you about how I first recognized how big goals help you accomplish big things.  And, I want to tell you what the Southern Pacific Railroad and Valley Home had to do with that.     The Southern Pacific railroad operated that spur between Stockton and Oakdale for well over 100 years.  So, when I was growing up in Valley Home the train ran through town at least twice per day, sometimes more.  My house was separated from the train tracks by Valley Home Road.  My window faced the tracks, so when the train came through at night while I was laying in bed I would listen to it and listen to it blow its horn.    Through the miracle of modern technology and an incredible hunting app called OnX, I can tell you the precise distance from my bedroom window, where the head of my bed sat, to where the railroad tracks used to be - 51 yards.  So, there was a mere 153 feet separating me from that rolling, steel behemoth, when it came through at night.  No wonder I used to think it was possible that if it were to derail that one of the freed train cars would come rolling through through my bedroom.   Actually, the train never came through town very fast.  If it had derailed, it would have been about the most boring derailment known to man.  And actually, the slow speed in which it came through town really emboldened me and many of my friends to...