01/30/2026
I wrote this 4 years ago on my FB page about growing up in DeMotte here... Hopefully most of you can identify with this and enjoy the read... Thank you so much for everything!...
Mike Swart spent the 1st two years of his life in a drafty old house trailer... My Dad worked at night on the house so he could move my Mom and I out of that trailer... Soon my Brother was born too... Dan and I had many adventures out there on Swart Farms, we explored every sand hill, every ditch bank, every inch of the woods... We'd take the garden hose around the back of the house and run tiny rivers thru the dirt when we were little... Covered in mud and our blue jeans soaking wet, creating way too much laundry to dry on the clothesline... We built a crooked tree house the real way, with spare boards and rusty nails, between the gnarled branches of a giant white oak... We manned the pulleys and bent many nails as we hammered this fortress together... When we heard the chickens cackling, we'd run out to the chicken yard to collect the eggs and bring them back to the house... Barefooted, we'd have to scratch the chicken s**t from between our toes with a stick and a held nose... Our BB guns were always ready for frog hunting and our Airedale, Fuzzy, sifted thru the ditch water looking for something unseen to protect us from... Later, our basketball games on the hard dirtpan were to be the stuff of legend... The wire hoop and the tongue-in-groove backboard was all that these true Hoosier kids ever needed... When we got older, our small world expanded as we cruised every back road in NW Indiana... Our friends would join us for fishing the Hodge, with 1 pole in the water and another casting with a Mepps spinner... Loaded into the back of a pick-up, driving slowly along the farm ditches and shooting musk-rat before they could burrow and cave in the banks... When I graduated high school, I moved to Purdue in West Lafayette for the next 4 & 1/2 years, where I learned that I wasn't quite as smart as I needed to be... I came home to work for Dad in the summers and school breaks... I never missed a day, and now, I miss working with him every day... Graduated college to begin working and save some cash to build a home of my own... If only I'd had a "real job" like my Brother... I met a small town girl in Cedar Lake and somehow managed to win her heart... Engaged after 9 months of dating, and married 1 year after that, we settled down in a house on the property I'd saved that work money to buy... In another 6 years, the real adventure began when we started filling that house up with kids...
I guess that you could say that I'm small town and small time... But I've had the best life that a Midwest guy could ever have so far...
Thank you, everyone, for the help you've given me... I try every day to return that favor... I've had happiness and heartache, I've known heaven and hell... I miss my grandparents, my uncle, and some friends that I've lost (R.I.P. Shane Gentry)... I love my wife and my kids more than anything in the world, my parents, my brother's family, my in-laws, my friends, and my whole extended family... I love God and my guns... The Midwest supports the world and I couldn't be prouder to be a part of that...
I am NW Indiana through and through and I'll never apologize for it...
