Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
My friend J.C. Fowler was a running back for the Cowboys. He was a farm kid from the Imperial Valley of California. J.C. spoke fluent Spanish, from supervising farm workers for his father, the superintendent of a 3,000-acre truck farm. He was also the most naturally gifted pianist I’ve ever encountered.
If J.C. heard a song, just once, he could play it by ear.
One day I was working out with J.C. in the trophy room of the old Wyoming Fieldhouse. The room had trophies on the north facing wall and a view of the parking lot out of the windows to the south.
We were spotting for each other on the bench press when a couple of oversized UW lineman came into the weight room. They packed 45-pound weights onto the bar and proceeded to bench press 335 pounds, but they could only do three reps.
J.C. and I only had 225 pounds on the bar, but were doing three sets of eight reps.
“Those guys are weight room strong, “J.C. said. “We’re farm boy strong.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard that term, and I asked him what it meant.
“They can lift a lot of weight, but they get tired, real tired, and wouldn’t last on a farm,” he replied.
J.C. was right.
All those days in the sun lifting 75-pound bales onto a hay trailer, then unloading them by hand did build endurance. In J.C’s case, it was 80-pound boxes of cabbage, onions and lettuce, loaded into trucks from dawn to dusk.
There is much to be said for “farm boy” strength.
One summer my friend and construction partner Tad McMillan and I were renovating a floor and building a garage for Dr. Jim Logan out on his place off of Burma Road.
I was sick, with a 102-degree temperature, but I went to work anyway.
We hired the son-in-law of one of Sue’s fellow teachers to help us that day setting trusses, decking the roof and packing shingles. Matt was a big kid, the starting center for an NAIA school in eastern Nebraska and one of those weight room monsters.
It was a hot day, it almost hit my early morning temperature at 101 degrees.
We broke for lunch and Matt couldn’t get back up. He may have had heat stroke. We didn’t know but he just sat on the ground unable to move in the shade of my pickup truck.
Tad tried to shame him back to work by telling him, “You’re a college football player, this guy is 20 years older than you with a fever and he’s back at work.” But it didn’t help, the kid was suffering.
Tad and I kept at it until four in the afternoon. We usually worked until 5 p.m. but Matt was still out of commission and we knocked off early to take him home.
He didn’t come back.
Grueling, physical labor isn’t for everyone, and it seems to be something that is almost non-existent with the present generation.
Most hay producers have gone to big bales, either round or 3×3, 3×4 or the big boys, 4×4 bales. My equipment is all paid for and I have a Hesston small baler. I don’t’ have enough acreage to warrant purchasing a big baler so I look for summer help to stack the small squares.
I still stack a few, but with 68 trips around the sun looking me in the face in a few weeks, it’s not something I relish as I once did.
In 2008, I had 1100 of these little beauties to pick up. I called a couple of friends who had teenage boys. They were all Riverton football players. I paid them 50 cents a bale to pick up and stack in our hay yard. The going rate is now a dollar a bale. That’s a big jump from the 10 cents a bale my friends and I charged 50 years ago, but I digress.
One of the boy’s moms was concerned that he’d miss the morning weightlifting session at Riverton High School. She called the coach to see if it was okay. He called me and asked how many bales I had. He wanted the rest of the team to stack a little hay by hand as well, but four boys were enough.
The coach was well versed in “farm boy” strong.
They picked up the 1100 bales in two short workdays and split $550 in the process.
When I asked them if it was harder than a lifting session in the weight room they just grinned at me and said, “You think?”
The days of farm boy strength in young men is diminishing. Keyboards and phones now command their attention and even the almighty dollar can’t break the magical hold digital devices have on our youth.
I had a great job as a college student for the first three summers, stacking 1×4 and 2x4s at the Louisiana Pacific planning mill down below Monroe in southwest Riverton. I started at $3.73 an hour and two years later was bumped to $5.28 on the night shift. Six days a week, nine hours a day meant 14 hours of overtime.
I was a rich man even after I paid for books, tuition and room and board back in Laramie.
One week we had a breakdown and they laid us off from Thursday through Saturday.
I got a call from a guy, who heard from who knows who, that I might be interested in loading a semi-load of 100-pound bags of oats from a rail car on the old Chicago North Western line to a semi-trailer.
When I asked what they paid, he said $10 an hour, my next question was when can we start?
I made $60 in a little over five hours, the guy with the semi-trailer generously rounded up.
At 21, 100-pound bags were nothing, and walking down a plank from a rail car to a truck was easy money.
When I think of those days, I’m reminded often of one of my favorite Bob Seeger songs, “Like a Rock.” Here are the first three verses.
Stood there boldly, sweatin’ in the Sun
Felt like a million, felt like number one
The height of summer, I’d never felt that strong
Like a rock
I was 18, didn’t have a care
Working for peanuts, not a dime to spare
But I was lean and solid everywhere
Like a rock
My hands were steady, my eyes were clear and bright
My walk had purpose, my steps were quick and light
And I held firmly to what I felt was right
Like a rock
As I enter the winter of my life, I miss those days.