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TI: Well, I love these stories. I'm a city boy, so what amazes me, I'm just listening to you... so growing up as a young man, a boy, young man, you had to deal with lots of machinery, lots of gadgets, lots of, you know, lot of different things, innovative things to, to make farming easier.

VW: Yeah, that's right, yeah. And sometimes things were tough, and sometimes the machinery didn't work very well. I know that we had, we had a mower, and it was a five-foot mower. And this mowing thing would fall down and then you'd drive it, and it would go along and cut the alfalfa. And then when we got that all cut, and once it started drying, you had to know when to start raking it. If you raked it too soon, it might be too green yet. And then when you put it in the barn, you'd start a fire from internal combustion. And I've seen hay come in, I've been in a haymow, and trying to move it around, and you stick your hand in, into this big pile, you had to pull it out. It was too hot. It would just create tremendous amounts of heat. And so to rake it up, you had to know what to do, and only from experience. You couldn't tell anybody how, you'd tell a little bit, but you had to have that knowledge. And then we had a side-delivery rake, which would rake, rake and then it'd move this hay into windrows. And then with the hayloader and with the, with the hay rack, we'd go over this windrow, and it'd pick up on this hayloader, come up, and it'd fall on the, on the hayrack. And then another thing you had to do, you had to be able to balance this hay when it got on the hayrack, because if you put too much one side, didn't know how to stack it right, it would tip over when you took it to the barn. And then you'd be the laughingstock of all farmers when, if you were the loader. And sometimes they'd just laugh, "Don't hire him for being, for loading your hay, 'cause he'll dump it. He'll dump it on you." So...

TI: So there's a real skill in terms of knowing when to pick up the hay, how to load it.

VW: Yeah.

TI: And was this something that you would do with other farmers, or help other farmers with?

VW: Oh, yeah. Oh, sometimes farmers would exchange their help for our help, our help for their help, and with their help and so on. So especially in threshing and also hay, haying. When haying season came, I used to just not like it, because, for two reasons. One, it was a lot of work, it was like maybe fifteen hours a day because it was summertime, and you'd work until dark. And then you started as soon as the dew got off, and started haying. But the problem was the dust, and I had hay fever something awful, and, but I would just ignore it in those days. Nowadays, people complain about it and they have to go to the doctor's and all that stuff, and it's just kind of funny, really. We never did that. We never went, I don't recall ever having gone to the doctor ever. And being on the farm, too, you know, but I don't, I just don't remember that at all. We did go to have our teeth cleaned and fixed and so on, but I don't recall ever going to a doctor.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.