On the Moraine XXXIII

By Jim Thompson

When it came to working in the fields, I had three favorite seasons. Soil preparation, especially plowing; hay-making and wheat harvest. I usually did not get to participate much in the fall harvest, for that was going on while I was in school.

Soil preparation was while I was in school, too, but I would usually come home and drive a tractor, plowing until nine or ten at night. On Friday nights, I would run until much later. In the early years of full-time farming, this was usually with the Case DC, for it had the best lights and a large gas tank.  

In the later years, we bought an Oliver 770 Diesel, which I would run all night when I could. Diesel was only about 13 cents a gallon in those days.

Being on those tractors at night was like being on a ship at sea, or at least so I imagined. Because of darkness, your world was the stretch of the headlights and rear light, and you could pretend the world went on forever beyond that. A sea of plowed soil. Then there was the smell, oh, the smell. There is no finer smell than freshly plowed soil, except perhaps freshly baled hay.

I really enjoyed hay-making season. The smell was great, but there was the camaraderie with other teenagers hired to help. And then there was the pay. Finally, a task for which I actually got paid!

We’ll save wheat for a little later, but it had its particular joys for me, too.

What I didn’t like was cultivating soybeans or corn. Sometimes this is called “plowing.” Far too tedious for me and I would get off the rows and plow up about 50 feet or so of valuable plants. When John got old enough to plow beans or corn, he got the job. He was very patient and would just putt-putt along. I doubt he ever destroyed a plant except when turning around in the end rows.

One summer, we planted the 50 acres on the McNary farm, the 50 acres that now has Fred Martin’s shop in one corner, in soybeans. The year before, it had been in corn and so it had lots of volunteer corn in it. So, for about three weeks in late July, early August that year, the whole family went over to the McNary farm after supper, and we hoed. We hoed that entire 50 acres. I would have said it couldn’t be done, but we did it. We were only after the volunteer corn, so we were not meticulously hoeing around each bean plant, but still that was quite a job.

All of this equipment required maintenance, of course. We sharpened plow shares in the forge.  We removed and sharpened cultivator spades on a standing grinder. Most other repairs were done in situ wherever the equipment broke down.

Later in life, when I oversaw maintenance and other departments in a large paper mill near Akron, I enjoyed maintenance most of all. It was a very old mill, and I told people that the maintenance was like having a perpetual line of ’57 Chevies needing major work. This activity finally helped the profitability of the mill when we caught up on about 25 years of maintenance neglect.  

That success eventually got me promoted to mill manager, which, like cultivating, I found very boring and left.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.