From 11/10/17 "Story Worth"

How did I get my first job?

       Doesn't that seem like the easiest question in the world?   But, it has me stumped.  How did I get it?  But, more basically what was it?   Growing up on a South Dakota farm in the '40's and '50's was very different than much of anything today.   Farm children were working, at least on our farm and the others that I knew, from a very early age.  How old were we when we were first sent to bring the cows up from the pasture for milking?  How old were we when we collected eggs?  When did we start watering the calves in the barn or start milking cows?  

       Child labor on the farm could be divided into two categories.  In the first category would be daily chores.  This would include milking cows twice a day.  Feeding and watering the calves housed in the barn was an afternoon job.  The chickens had to be fed daily and the eggs were also collected daily.   One of the duties I found hard was to go to the barn after dinner ( we called it supper) to milk when it was sub-zero cold.  Included in this category could be other duties like yard word, mowing, shoveling snow, cutting firewood, carrying cobs and coal to the house and much more.

        The other category could be called field work and that was sporadic.  Manually this work was very arduous at times such as haying and harvest.  Perhaps my least favorite duty ever was, when on cold spring days, with the wind blowing (the wind always blew), picking up rocks that the frost had lifted from the ground over winter.  It seemed that we spent much time with either a pitchfork or a shovel in our hand. Tractor work I didn't mind so much: plowing, discing, cultivating, harrowing and much more.

         But. this doesn't answer how I got my fist job.  Wayne Henricksen was a local farmer for whom I worked off and on for some years and this was probably my first real job away from our farm.  It entailed the usual farm work.  He also did custom corn shelling.  In those days corn was harvested 'on the ear' and stored in cribs.  Before it could be sold the kernels had to be shelled from the cobs and that's where a custom corn sheller would be employed.  There were two or three shellers in the community who would be contracted by the farmers to do their shelling.   We would pull the Minneapolis Moline corn sheller to a farms cribs and we'd also provide a truck for hauling the corn to the local grain elevator.  Corn shelling was back breaking work.

        Wayne also bailed flax straw for sale.  Flax straw is used to make fine paper and linen. There was a good market for it. Flax was a crop that farmers added to the small grains and corn.  Flax straw is very tough and farmers were glad to get rid of it.  Wayne,working with is brother-in-law, Gene Olsen and a friend, Charles Larson, running two balers and two trucks,would bale hundreds or acres and thousands of bales.  I spent many hours baling. loading, trucking and unloading.

        Yet...I don't remember how I actually started working for Wayne.  I think it was probably in my last year of high school. I do remember how I got my job for the summer of '57, after my first year of college.  Earl Sorensen lived a mile and a half east of our farm.  He connected me with his brother, Herald,  who lived twenty miles west of us and had a big farm.  So, I signed on as his hired man for the summer. If I remember correctly, I was paid $145. a week.  I lived with his family; he had a wife and 2 year old daughter.  We had breakfast at 5:30 a.m., dinner at noon and supper at 9:00 p.m, six days a week. I had Sunday off.  One of the perks of working for Herald was driving his new John Deere Model 70 diesel. 

        I can remember no off the farm jobs before my enlistment in the USMC began in 1959/