Butch Remembers Those Teenage Summer Days of Work

   When I was a teenager back in the 1960s, during the summer months I played baseball and helped on the farm. I don’t recall my Dad ever paying me for the jobs…cleaning out the hog barns, chopping weeds, painting the barns, working the fields, etc. It was considered my family duty to help out and “earn my keep,” although he usually gave me pocket change to spend when he drove to Darlington four or five times a week. I usually headed to the drug store for an ice cream cone, a Green River or Red River phosphate, and a pack of Topps baseball cards. 

  To earn money, I mowed seven yards in town with a push mower. Each one took about an hour, and the owners paid me a dollar. One elderly lady only paid me 85 cents, but another lady paid me $1.25…if I swept her sidewalk and went inside after I was done to have iced tea and cookies with her. I think she was lonely and just wanted someone to talk to. Like many teenage boys, I also helped bale hay and straw for nearby farmers. That job paid $1.00 an hour, but a few farmers paid 2 cents per bale. Since most farmers did not own a baler, they hired David “Barney” Caldwell to do their baling. I rode on the wagon, with a hay hook in hand, grabbed the bales as they came out the back of the baling machine, and stacked these five, six, or seven layers high. There was no such thing as “weight training” for sports in those days. Baling hay did the job and built up the muscle!

   When I was 13 years old, I also began detasseling corn for DeKalb seed corn company, which was located on Darlington Avenue. It was hot and dirty work for sure. A bus took us to the fields, and we walked down the rows of corn, pulling the tassels from the top of the corn stalks one by one. We did this all day long…from early morning until late in the afternoon, with an hour break for lunch, which we brought from home. The detasseling had to be done in a few weeks, so we usually worked ten hours each day, six days a week. Bugs, corn leaf cuts, bee stings, unbearable heat, thorny briers, and sometimes muddy fields…we suffered through it all to earn some big money…60 cents an hour times 60 came to $36 gross weekly income before taxes and social security took it’s cut. I was rich! I did this for two years, and then rode on a detasseling machine the third year. No, I didn’t have to walk, but had to bend over and pull the tassels as the machine went slowly down the rows of corn. Oh, my aching back!

    I saved my money, never buying much at all, until State Fair time rolled around, during which I usually lost a bit trying to win prizes at the carnival booths on the midway. After a summer of playing baseball and working, I was ready to begin the new school year…looking forward to seeing my classmates again, meeting my new teachers…and of course…eager for basketball season to start.

John “Butch” Dale is a retired teacher and County Sheriff. He has also been the librarian at Darlington the past 36 years, and is a well-known artist and author of local history.