[Zeke]

I've always ben industrious. I mowed lawns during jr high; that sort of thing. I've had 100's of jobs. My dad taught me how to get one and it worked every time. All I had to do was go back 2 maybe 3 times and I'd get hired.

When I was 13, 14, and 15, I went to my grandmother's farm for 2 weeks starting the day after school was out. My granddad died one year before I was born so my grandmother ran a 360 acre farm alone. She grew potatoes and cotton mostly.

Those 2 weeks were potato digging season and she had her own railroad siding as well as a processing and sacking shed. It was metal and the Bakersfield heat was usually around 100º midday in June. I had to get up at 5am and start filling water jugs for the workers with ice and water. After the line got up and running at 6:30am my job was to keep checking the conveyor belt under the main floor where the potatoes were washed, graded and sacked. The culls (sliced by the digger or rotten) got thrown down the holes in the floor to that conveyor and loaded into a huge hopper to be trucked out to an airfield to dry for livestock food.

Nothing wasted on a farm.

If that conveyor got stuck, potatoes spilled out everywhere under the shed. There was about 6' of headroom and chains and gears whirring like crazy. If the potatoes started pilling up because I didn't check often enough, I shoveled them back up on the belt. Now, if you've smelled rotten potatoes in 100º heat, you know what kind of job that was.

She paid me the same as the labor on the floor, about $1.25.hr. Thing is, they ran that line 10 hours a day six days a week for 2 weeks until all were dug. Do the math and I took home $250 bucks all said and done. I bought my first go kart with that money. I bought my first car, a '57 Corvette with some of that money.

She died at age 58, 3 days before my 16th birthday, so that was the end of that. Never worked on a farm since and that is something I might have missed out on.

There was so much more to a farm than rotten potatoes and I enjoyed so much of it as a youngster. If you can imagine driving a D2 Caterpillar at 14, you know what I mean.