Chapter 9
Baling, Baptizing, and Sister Sandra
It was in the fall
of 1934 when they started upgrading the road through Bona from Dadeville from a
rocky little country road to a graveled farm-to-market road. The work was done under President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt’s WPA program.
I knew that “WPA”
stood for Works Progress Administration and was financed by the government to
help recovery form the Depression, but my father had a different name for
it. He said it stood for “Whistle, Piss,
and Argue” because that is what the lazybones who signed up for it mostly did
while they leaned on a shovel instead of putting in an honest day’s work.
My father would
not sign up for the WPA work at first because it was necessary to sign up for
Relief before a man could get a WPA job and Dad was not about to take any
charity. He only wanted what he earned.
Dad was fond of
telling a WPA joke about an old lady who wanted someone to come and mow her
yard because she was a widow and a cripple.
The man she talked to asked her how many holes there were in her
outhouse. She said it was a two-holer so
he sent eight men and two lawn mowers to do the job. When the old lady asked the foreman that dropped
the men off why so many, he said, “Well, you have a two-holer. I had to bring enough men that we can have
two coming, two going, two sitting, and two mowing!”
Hard Times were in
full swing with money scarce to non-existent
but Dad held out for quite a while.
We got by the winter fairly well partly because the WPA rented a half
acre beside the road by our barnlot on which to park their bulldozer and road
grader equipment at night during the time they were working on the stretch of
road south of Bona.
The bulldozer was
a very primitive diesel machine that had no glow plugs or electric
starter. On cold mornings the operator
had a hard time getting it going. I
sometimes would go down there and watch him start it before I left for school
as I was always interested in anything in the way of machinery.
What the dozer
drive had to do was to keep a blowtorch on hand. He would heat the cylinder heads of the engine
with the blowtorch then he had to crank the engine by inserting a steel bar in
a big flywheel to turn the engine over.
Compared to that, starting our pump house putt-putt was a lead pipe
cinch.
When that old
engine finally started it made a heck of a racket. I could hear it almost all the way to school—which
was a mile and a quarter.
 |
| WPA farm-to-market roadwork |
Grading,
gravelling, and making ditches along the road was a great improvement. It had been simply a little rocky land
bordered by rusty barbed wire fence with overgrown fencerows of weeds and brush
and vine-covered stubby poles supporting the single bare telephone wire. It was dusty during the hot summers and in
winter it became a quagmire of mud when it rained—which was not often during
the drought years. It was often full of
ruts and pot holes—which we called “chug holes” because a wagon or car wheel
would go “ker-chug” in them.
The crews graded
new ditches, prepared the roadbed with river gravel, then surfaced it with
crushed rock. We called that “chat”
because that was the sound it made when a shovel full was thrown onto the
roadbed. Up until then the road had been
sort of maintained by the neighborhood men using an old horse-drawn road grader
that sat rusting away on the edge of the ball field on the south edge of Bona.
It was the very
depths of Hard Times in the Ozarks by the spring of 1935. The drought went on seemingly endlessly. Crops withered and pastures turned brown in
the early summer except for the jimson weeds, polkberry, and Canadian thistles. Wells and springs were low and the creeks and
rivers ran slow and sluggish with dingy water that, as the saying went, was “too
thick to drink and too thin to plow.”
The price of eggs bottomed
out at nine cents a dozen. Gasoline was
ten cents a gallon for low test and twelve cents for high test ethyl. That sounds ridiculous now but in those days
it was enough when the average farm hand made a dollar a day—fi he could find a
job.
It was in 1935
that I got my first paying job. One of
the neighbors, Ben Long (father of pretty little Betty Lou), had a tractor-powered
hay baler. At haying time Ben would tour
from farm to farm and bale hay for a share.
He had a crew of two for the baler and the farm owner would arrange for
a crew to bring the hay to the stationary baler. Ben was the loader at the baler and he had one
man to tie the wires on the bales and one to buck the bales off the tailboard
and into stacks for later transportation to the barn.
I had not yet
reached my full height by six inches and was not very heavy but my muscles were
farm tough. When I hit Ben up for the job
of bucking bales, he looked me over doubtfully and said, “You reckon you could
keep up all day? Timothy bales run sixty
or seventy pounds and alfalfa will go seventy or eighty.”
“I can keep
up. I’ve plowed with a walking plow all
day more than once. Give me a change and
I’ll show you. How much you pay the
bucker?”
“Fifty cents a day—that’s
what I pay. Some of them black boys I get from around Dadeville ain’t worth half
that.” He eyed my small frame again and
finally said, “All right, I’ll give you a try—but if you give out on me before
quittin’ time, I’ll have to get me someone else.”
“Won’t give out—you’ll
see.”
The job dang near
killed me the first couple of days. I
used a hay hook in each hand to snag the square bales off the chute then had to
carry and stack them away from the baling machine. Between bales, I had to take the bale
separation block back up to the loader then, on the way back, push the two wires
for the next bale back through to the tier who sat on a stool on the other
side.
The first day was
the real killer. I had not gotten into
the swing of the routine. To make
matters worse, we were baling alfalfa for my Uncle Claud and I think Ben
deliberately screwed the machine down to pack around eighty pounds into each
bale. They also seemed to get heavier as
the day went on, especially when the stack got high enough that I had to swing
the bales up as high as my head to the top course of the stack.
Ben kept that old
rig going at a good clip all day with very few times out for a drink and a
breather except for the lunch hour when Aunt Virge fed us a huge fried chicken
dinner with all the trimmings and plenty of her fat light bread buns slathered
with lots of hand churned butter.
At times during
the day I would see Ben looking slyly at me sidewise with a half-smile on his
tanned face and that made me more determined than ever to not holler “uncle”
and give up. My back ached and my hands
blistered but I kept plugging away.
Ben killed the
engine on the tractor just before sunset.
/by then my fanny was dragging so bad that it was wiping my tracks out
behind me. As I hung my hay hooks on the
side of the baler, Ben came up and clapped a hand on my sagging shoulder. “Well, boy—I didn’t think you would last more
than an hour but you done it!”
As I was inspecting
the blisters on my hands, some of which had broken, Ben handed me two quarters
and said, “Better get you a pair of gloves, boy. The job is yours. It will be mite easier tomorrow. We’ll be baling timothy over at Duane King’s place
and the bales will be lighter. See you
in the mornin’.”
I drug my sore
body the two miles home, aching all over; however, I was one proud young man
when I displayed my two quarters at the supper table. It was nearly the most money that I had ever
had at one time. I noticed that Richard
eyed the two quarters then sat staring off into space thinking.
“Well,” Richard
said later, “you get fifty cents for grunt work. How much does the guy get that sits and ties
the wires?”
“Seventy-five cents.”
“uh-huh—and he
gets to sit down alongside the baler all day, too.” There was a bemused expression on Richard’s
freckled face when I left to go to Grandpa’s store and spend a quarter on a
pair of canvas work gloves.
The next day,
Richard went along with me when I hiked across the fields to the baler at Duane
King’s place. He spent part of the
morning just wandering around watching the wire tier. During a break, Richard told Ben that he
could tie wires if Ben should nee someone.
A day or two later the tier did not show up and Richard had the
job. He had out-smarted me again.
We spent the rest
of the haying season on that baler crew, me bucking all those bales and Richard
sitting in the shade of the baler making half again as much as I was getting. Bending those wires made his hangs strong,
but the muscle I put on meant that soon I could hold my own in a fight with
him.
