You may not know it, but each and every maize seed has a little stinger on it. These stingers are bad enough when you get the heads out of the field in the fall and fork them into a storage bin. In the fall you are working most of the time out in the open air. But when that feed lies in storage all winter, it dries out month after month and it collects dust from West Texas weather and from the grains themselves where mice, rats, and birds have eaten, slept and roosted. And then, when you load it into a truck, you have to get in the storage bin, under a sheet metal roof, with a blazing sun bearing down on the roof. And each little stinger on each grain is harder and more brittle than it was in the fall, and all these stingers break off the seeds more easily, more of them mix in with the dust, and they get into your eyes, your nose, down your collar and lodge in the wrinkles of your stomach, and they get in under your arms and around the tops of your shoes and they dig into your ankles. Eventually, there is not any place on your body that doesn't sting and itch. What's more, the stinging and itching goes on after a bath. Now I believe you will agree with me—it shouldn't happen to a dog. When you have a job like that, you hate it, you detest it, and you dread having to face it the next day. But you do it, and you keep on doing it until the job is finished, because you like to eat, and the job pays money and you have to earn money in order to eat.
Do you get the picture? Well, wait a minute, I'm only half through. We have yet to haul the maize to the railroad car, fork it into the car, then get into the car and pitch it all the way back to both ends and all the way to the ceiling. Did you ever work in a boxcar on a hot day in summertime? You choke on dust, you sweat, and each and every drop of sweat becomes a parking lot for dust and maize stingers that show no mercy.
Of course it helps to get home after a day of such torture and get a good bath. But some of the cars we loaded were in Roby. After a day of agony, we had to drive 22 miles over rough, crooked roads in a slow truck before we could get a bath.
In war, I have heard of torturing prisoners to get information from them. I have often wondered if they have thought of trying the maize-torture treatment.
There were other better jobs of course. One of my first jobs on Saturdays during my school years, aside from working for Papa, was in a grocery store. Mr. Gay was operating the Farm Bureau store. He offered me a job and I took it.
Come Saturday morning, Mr. Gay put me to sacking up beans, peas and potatoes in paper bags, getting them ready to sell. During the day we ran out of one item and a customer asked me where he would find another grocery store. I told him, but when the rush was over and we were alone, Mr. Gay told me never to send a customer to our competitor. He said tell them to try the drug store up on the corner. Then he added, "And if we run out of coffee, sell them split peas."
At the end of that first Saturday Mr. Gay paid me three dollars. I told him that was twice as much as he had offered me. He said he had fired two boys he was paying $1.50 each and that I did more work than both of them together. He paid me three dollars a day all the time I worked for him.
Another job in my younger days was working at Hudson's Filling
Station for Sox and Red Hudson. The pay was ten cents an hour—
keep my own time and pay myself from the cash register every
Saturday night.
We did some overhauls and a lot of tune-up work. One farmer had a Model T Ford that had a weak magneto. It would run only on the battery and Fords didn't run good except on mag. He needed $21 for a motor overhaul. But he was a poor boy and didn't have that kind of money. So I asked him if I might take a look at his coil points. He told me I couldn't do them any good, he had just come from the Ford garage where a mechanic had adjusted them. But Sox told him, "Let Clarence look at them, he won't do them any harm."
Now, the Ford mechanic only knew how to set the points for a strong magneto, and this mag was weak. I knew that a weak mag needed a weak diet, so I adjusted his points so that a weak mag would fire them. Fifteen minutes later the man drove away with his car running like a new one—on the magneto. A year later he was still running on the mag and had not had the motor overhauled. What did we charge the man? Nothing. He was a regular customer, and we did little things like that for our customers.