In the halls of academe, there is much talk of the need to impart financial literacy to our students, whether via formal education or informal tutelage. Avoid excessive student debt; understand credit card interest rates; plan and save for the future. These are all important lessons.
As a professor, I know that much can be taught and much can be learned in the classroom. I also know that some of the most valuable lessons are the practical ones, best learned experientially.
A dollar is not just an economics class lesson: medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value – it can also be backbreaking labor in the hot sun, work done by fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, to provide for themselves and their families.
I learned this in the farm fields as a boy. It was a lesson beyond price, one for which I am thankful to this day.
Ozarks Childhood
I grew up in the northern Arkansas foothills of the Ozarks. There were red clay, dirt roads on three sides of my childhood house, only one room was heated, and I remember the family joy when we first got hot water. Even though I could see cows from the back porch, I was a "city boy," living in the incorporated environs, on streets with real names rather than just numbers, in a community with about 900 other souls.
Then, as now, about a third of the region's population lived below the Federal poverty line. There were few summer jobs available to enterprising teenage boys, because there were precious few jobs of any kind. Any fulltime jobs rightfully went to heads of households, even at (or below) the minimum wage, which rose from $1.60/hour to $2.00/hour in 1974. I knew many families living on the munificence of such a weekly paycheck, and even on the best of days, my family was not far from that sad state itself. A summer garden was not an organic, fresh produce luxury; it was a necessity. (See Just a Taste of Sherbet.) Health insurance, well, for most folks, that was a dream beyond imagining.
In the summers, I made a bit of money mowing lawns, but few in the community had the discretionary income to indulge in such an extravagance. Otherwise, I spent time with my grandfather, fishing for "red bellies" (sunfish) and rainbow trout and listening to the St. Louis Cardinals baseball games on the radio. During both, he would regale me with stories, all of which he remembered as true, and some of which actually were. Among them were tales of working on the farm for two bits a day, from "can to cain't" (from dawn until too dark to see). (See What Really Matters.)
Hauling Hay
Like my grandfather, my father grew up as a sharecropper, but by the time I was born, there were no row crops left in northern Arkansas. The land was too poor, and agricultural mechanization had rendered it unprofitable. Instead, timber was cleared from the hills, and those fortunate enough to own land now raised livestock on permanent pasture. Those cattle had to be fed in winter, and every summer, someone had to help the famers put hay away. As I got older, this created a new income opportunity – hauling baled hay from fields to barns.
Let's set the stage. It is 95-105 degrees Fahrenheit, with the sun shining and the humidity hovering near, oh, let's just call it southern outrageous. In other words, it was nothing special, just a typical Ozarks summer day. The hay cutting has already been windrowed for baling, and there are five of us at work. The farmer is driving the tractor, which powers and pulls the baler, ejecting two-string bales every fifteen feet or so. The farmer's wife is driving the two ton, flatbed truck, a teenaged stacker sits in the back, and two other teenaged boys are walking behind.
I can still see myself in my mind's eye. I am wearing heavy work gloves to keep the two-string bales, each of which weighs 40-75 pounds, depending on the type of hay, from cutting my hands to pieces. My job is to walk from bale to bale, pick them up, and lift them onto the truck bed for stacking. This was economic efficiency manifest – at three cents a bale, teenaged boys are far cheaper than a front loader.
Because I was not strong enough to lift the bales all day without touching my chest, I wore a long sleeved work shirt, which, despite the heat, was buttoned tightly to keep the hay from slicing my chest and arms. (At day's end, I discovered that the skin in the gap between my gloves and shirt was raw from repeated cuts.)
Each time the truck was filled, we drove from the field to the barn and began unloading. While tossing bales onto the growing tiers for stacking by my partner, I realized it was well over 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the barn loft, and I yearned for the breeze and the relative coolness of the open fields. During the rides to the barn, I grabbed my one-gallon plastic milk bottle and chugged ice water, thankful for the brief respite.
With sunset approaching, and after the last bale had been stacked in the barn, the farmer drove me home in his pickup truck and paid me in cash. I remember climbing slowly, painfully out of the truck, clutching my hard-earned six dollars.
That night, I could not sleep. It hurt every time I moved, and I coughed hay dust from my lungs, remembering how it had swirled in the barn's shadows all afternoon. In this world, respirators or masks were figments of an OSHA-fueled imagination.
I had thought I was in good physical condition for a teenaged boy, and I was. I had stacked lumber at the sawmill, working with grown men. I could play three hours of full court basketball in an un-air-conditioned gym, and not give it a second thought.
I was young and fit, and I thought hauling hay would be easy money; I was wrong.
Nevertheless, when another farmer came calling a few days later, I grabbed my work gloves and headed out the door. I needed the money, they needed help, and it paid three cents a bale.
Lessons Learned
Those days hauling hay as a teenager may have been among the most important educational lessons I have ever received, almost as important as understanding the power of plum jelly, and I carry them with me still.
I looked at my father with newfound respect; he worked hard at the sawmill in that hot sun every day to provide for us, and he never complained. He did what was right, not what was easy. I appreciated in a new and visceral way that there is dignity in honest work, no matter how difficult, and respect is due.
To this day, when I hold a dollar bill in my hands, I know it represents the fruits of real labor – three cents a bale – and I think carefully whether an item is really worth thirty bales. It is an emotional measure, another, personal medium of exchange.
Most importantly, I am thankful for the blessings I have received in this life and what so many have done for me. (See Transforming Lives Via Public Higher Education.)
I learned a lot, livin' large on three cents a bale.
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