Recalling Time before Chemicals

Farming before chemicals, I’m sure there are few students that were not told during grade school of the American Indian’s method of planting corn using decaying fish carcasses as fertilizer. I guess this could be considered an early form of using chemicals in farming. Although this may be true, it is not chemical farming, as we know it today. When I was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, farmer’s used cultivation to grow weed free crops. I remember many sunburns at our house during the summer from hand cultivation, AKA “walking beans” or “rouging corn”. As a pre-teen or early teen, you were too young to get a summer job at the local grocery or café in town, so youngsters would call on local farmers, or family friends who farmed, to make pocket money walking beans or rouging corn. It lasted a few weeks and the pay was good, sometime they would get 35 cents an hour. At the end of the summer they may have made $100, a lot of money for someone your age. Every farmer had a cultivator for their tractor and it was usually the younger members of the family that were charged with making sure the soybeans and early corn were kept free of weeds. If you worked for your family you often did not get cash like the hired kids did. You were often told it built character, and after all you would get new clothes for school with the money they saved, and didn’t they pay your way into the theatre and pay for your soda and popcorn? Somehow that was little compensation at the time, not actually having your own money in your hand to pay for those same exact things. Compensation usually came in the form of dad letting you drive the tractor well before any of the kids from town were considered old enough to do so, because he felt you grew up around the equipment and knew more. Somehow that seemed to make up for a bit of it. Now as I near the Social Security generation I look back at those days. I never had a cell phone or even a private line once we finally got a phone to our home. But whom would I have called anyway; none of my friends had a phone either. Round-up was what you did when the chickens got out, hide and go seek, tag and baseball were fun things to do and they didn’t involve a mall, quarters, X-box, Wii, etc. and I turned out all right. I guess Dad knew something I didn’t understand at the time “it all built character.”