Harold L. Tomter, born on October 3, 1923, was raised on a forty-acre farm located in the Town of Pigeon, Trempealeau County, Wisconsin. After graduation from Whitehall High School in 1943, Tomter served in the U.S. Army Air Corps until 1946, worked his parents' former farm and, beginning in the spring of 1952, rented a two hundred acre dairy farm owned by Pigeon Falls banker Oscar Sletteland. Tomter rented Sletteland's farm under a share arrangement for more than fifteen years, and in 1968 quit farming altogether at a time when he had an opportunity to purchase the farm from Sletteland's heirs.
Lorna Miller, assistant to the chancellor, University of Madison-Extension (and former educational director of the Farmers Educational and Cooperative Union of America, Wisconsin Division) suggested in 1975 that Tomter would be a worthwhile interviewee from the standpoint of a tenant farmer who had climbed the agricultural ladder and then stepped down at a critical moment.
