My father’s birthday is tomorrow so I thought I would regale you with stories from my youth.
Most of you know I grew up on a farm in Oklahoma. We grew wheat, cotton and peanuts and raised cattle and hogs. Lots of people ask me “How many acres did you farm?” and I always have a hard time answering that. Our farms were Simpson’s, Holmes’, the North Farm, “Where we lived”, the 80 and Great-grandmas. That is over 800 acres but not all of it was “broke” (cultivated) ground.
For a while we raised lots of pigs. We had a farrowing house and had several sows. Suffice it to that after a good rain it stank badly around our house.
We would take our pigs to Oklahoma City to the Stockyards to sell them. If I remember right, Justin and I were in school and Adam was too young to be in school one particular year. My dad would take Adam to the Stockyards and sell the pigs and then stop at Hydro on the way home, mainly to put the money in the bank. Across the street was what used to be known as a “5 and dime”. For some reason the first trip to the Stockyards that year he and Adam went across the street to the store and bought each one of us boys a tape. These tapes were produced by Fisher-Price and were stories, fairytales or retelling of historical events.
If I remember right, I would get a history one, like Ben Franklin, Justin a story one like Tom Sawyer and Adam a fairytale like Jack and the Beanstalk. We spent hours listening to those cassettes and I still remember scenes from them. In fact, I think we had them pretty much memorized word for word!
Was there every any real hope for me not to love history? I’ve always appreciated the fact my dad bought those tapes because it wasn’t anyone’s birthday or Christmas, he was just doing it because he loved us.
Most kids love it when they get out of school. When I got out of school, especially my freshman and sophomore years in high school, it just meant we went to work in the fields. My brothers were in a different school that had a later release date, plus they were younger, so that meant it was just my dad and I out in the fields everyday.
The start of school holidays also marked the start of the planting season. We needed to get the cotton and peanuts planted so that we could move on to the task of wheat harvest in late May or early June.
We would wait for a good rain and then as soon as the field was tillable, my dad and I would head out to plant. I would drive one tractor with a ‘crustbuster’ hitched behind it. A crustbuster cuts a wide swath, 20 feet or so, and its many long metal teeth break up the soil and prepare an appropriate planting bed.
My dad would drive my grandfather’s cabless tractor, my grandfather’s 4010 John Deere, if memory serves me correct. Both cotton and peanuts were planted in long rows. Behind the tractor was an implement called a planter. The planter had four hoppers, which were tall metal cylinders that held the seed. Behind and below the hopper was a wheel, which, when the planter was lowered via hydraulics rolled along the ground. This turned gears under the hopper and allowed seeds to fall one by one from the hopper. These seeds fell straight down through a tube and came out between two metal discs. These discs, when lowered to the ground, made a furrow that the seed fell into. Remember that wheel? It then rolled over the furrow and covered the seed.
Crustbusting was much faster than planting. I could finish a field in a couple of hours but the planting might take 12 or more for the same ground. Once I was finished, my job was to sit in the pick-up at the end of the rows. My dad would plant four rows down, then four rows back while I waited in the pick-up. When he got back, he would raise the planter, after which I would turn the wheels to cause the seed to fall onto the ground to make sure the seed was falling freely between the discs . Sometimes the fall would be blocked by mud or clods of dirt. I would then fill the hoppers with more seed and my dad would set off again.
Every few rounds, my dad would get down off the tractor and we would go to the last row he had planted. Kneeling in the soft brown dirt, we would dig to find a few of the seeds. We were checking to make sure the spacing was far enough that the plants wouldn’t choke each other out but not so far that very few plants would populate the field. We would also check to confirm the depth of the seed was appropriate. Too deep and it would never sprout. Too shallow and it would be washed away or never sprout as well.
One year in particular I remember that “Kokomo” was a song I listened to a lot in the pick-up as I waited for the tractor to complete its circuit. We finished the last field, Hudsons, after probably 10 days of planting. They were long days, sometimes 12 hours long. I just remember it was hard work.
After the last rows were planted, my dad parked the tractor and headed back to the last few rows he had planted. I followed him and we knelt there together in the bright late afternoon light. The pungent smell of tilled ground was strong as he started to dig up the last seeds of the planting season. Satisfied with their depth and placement, he reached up and took off his dirty-covered hat and looked at me. “Let’s pray for the crop” he said. I took off my hat and together we bowed our heads and prayed for God to bless the work of our hands and bring about a bountiful harvest by bringing timely rains and to keep the insects and disease at bay.
I like to think we had a bumper crop that year.
I’m sure my father barely remembers kneeling on Hudson’s farm that day or those cassettes but I do. Happy Birthday Dad!
