When Ferris was quite young, his parents, Jess and Pearl Zechiel, moved to the Walter Vonnegut farm “just where the (Academy) airport is,” says Ferris, so his father could work the farm, an endeavor with which young Ferris assisted. “They (Vonneguts) owned the big hardware in Indianapolis at that time,” he recalls. “That farm helped set out the (famous Vonnegut) orchard.

Dad set out two orchards there, and then he just worked to take care of that.”Young Ferris also started school nearby, in the first grade at the Maxinkuckee school, which still stands at the corner of 18B and Queen Roads. “Russel Easterday was my teacher…I walked to school. In second grade, we moved over to Poplar Grove, that schoolhouse at the bottom of the hill. I went there two years, (and) then they hauled me back to the Maxinkuckee school. I finished in sixth grade, and then my father moved us back up to Burr Oak. Mr. Behmer taught the school at Burr Oak. The Maxinkuckee school had two rooms, and Poplar Grove only one. All the grades were in that one room. There were a couple girls (there) in eighth grade, and a couple in seventh.”
“When we moved back up to Burr Oak, Dad had a horse and buggy and finally got a carriage. When dad got the first car in 1919, when it got wintertime he let it sit. (Culver) had a blacksmith shop…Saines had a grocery store on the corner there (of Main and Jefferson Streets). The stables were somewhere down in the lumber yard area. Dad parked the horses and we walked. The next year, they hauled us back to Culver and I finished out one year where the elementary school is today.”
“Kids who went to school rode a horse, and had to find a place to keep the horses. Easterday the undertaker (on Main Street) -- right back west of the bank there was a couple houses and he had a barn where he kept his horses for his undertaker business.”
Around 1923, the Zechiels moved to Henry Zechiel’s 330-acre farm just west of Culver, where they lived for 17 years. “I did most of the heavy work,” recalls Ferris. “He’d have me shuck one corn row and he’d take two. We went to the fields by daylight to husk corn. We milked 24 head of cows. I worked with my dad all my life. Mother said I was always with my dad and she never got much work out of me!”
Ferris’ two sisters are well known to many Culverites. Both Marguerite and Elizabeth continue to live in Culver, and Elizabeth (wife of the late Eldon Davis) continues to work at Culver Academy after decades of service.
Ferris went together with his parents and bought the farm on which he would spend most of the rest of his life, on State Road 110 south of Culver. There, through the years, they farmed the land and cared for 1,600 chickens and a number of cows for milking. Along the way, Ferris met his wife Leona, whom he married in 1932. “I got her out of the onion patch,” Ferris chuckles. “She worked for her brother raising onions and potatoes.” The couple celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary last fall.
Ferris and Leona also had children Betty and Larry – both of whom still live in the area – and a first child who died tragically of a ruptured appendix at age two.
Along the way, Ferris also saw the history of Culver evolve, and participated in his fair share of it. He recalls the well-known steamboats on Lake Maxinkuckee. “When winter time come, they took them down to the south end; there wasn’t any cottages down there at all, only one house…I heard my grandparents tell (that) they used to haul logs across the lake in the wintertime on the ice.”
 Ferris remembers his father’s and his work for the Medbourn ice house on East Jefferson Street. “A lot of men out there,” he says. “A steam engine ran the conveyer that brought the ice up, and men there would switch them down into the rooms. My dad’s brother worked out on the ice. They used a horse to mark it and crosscut saws to cut the ice, and they’d float them up on a channel and then ran the ice underneath the railroad tracks. When we moved to Henry’s, I got big enough, so I helped put up ice about two years before they did away with it.”
“I helped build that Academy airport (east of the campus on State Road 10). I had a team of horses and kept leveling the dirt off. The trucks would get stuck and they’d put a hook on and I’d pull them out of the soft dirt…back in them times, it was only 40-some cents an hour.”
Ferris also helped put the newly-built O.W. Fowler – the Academy’s beloved three-masted schooner, retired in the early 1980s – into the water.
“I remember when the bank was robbed the first time (in 1920). Dad and I came from Main Street north down past the bank, about 20 minutes after the bank got robbed…one man had a hat on and the bullet went through his hat. They killed Jake Saine (who) had the grocery store.”
“The second robbery (in 1933), we lived on Henry’s farm. I worked that area where (Culver’s trailer court on West Jefferson Street is) now. They had Carl Adams standing on the side of the car, and they kicked him off the car. I was in the field, I seen all the cars, the people from town was going out to catch (the robbers). They got them down there in the marsh; one of them just had his head out of the water in the ditch. Some of them was back where Hatten had his garage there (on Lake Shore Dr. and School St.), and some of them hid behind his gate. The people in town tracked them down in the snow and got those guys.”
Ferris Zechiel has amazed friends and family by continuing to work until quite recently, including plowing his field in 2006, at the age of 98. Today, he muses about the changes he has seen in the world through his long life: the transition from crank telephones to cell phones, $30 monthly salaries to $30 hourly salaries in the mechanics industry, and the use of computers, which his daughter Betty uses to bring him Bible devotions. “The good old book says that the people will grow in knowledge,” he says. “There’s nothing new there.”