If it were not for skeptics, I could go ahead with my memoirs. But I feel I should detour here and explain a thing or two, or some folks will think I am lying. One man has already questioned my story about the two-row planter. He thought they hadn't made a two-row planter as early as 1910. This one happened to be a special type planter. I have never seen but two of them in my lifetime.
But you could be sure, if William Franklin Johnson heard of a farm implement that he thought could be used to do a better job on the farm, he would get it, if at all possible. And if it wouldn't do to suit him, he would make it do whatever he wanted it to do.
I remember having seen Papa, as early as the Flint place, mind you, using a combination cultivator-planter. He could cultivate his young feed or cotton and, at the same time, plant new seeds in the skips where the first planting had not come up to a good stand.
He built the implement himself. That was ingenuity. He was my father.
This special two-row planter that I used was pulled by two big, gentle horses. They knew how to follow the furrows and stay on the rows. And they knew that "whoa" meant stop, even when a three-year-old said it. What's more, Papa was plowing along beside me, just a few rows away, and he worked the lever and turned my team around at both ends of the rows.
Now, that doesn't sound so far out, does it?
I'll bet the people around the little town of McCaulley would believe me without an explanation. They had a man in their community who used a dog to do his plowing for him. It's true. And the man didn't have to be there to work the levers for him and turn the team around at the end of the rows.
There were no rows. He was flatbreaking his ground, going round and round. His mules followed the furrow all day long and the man only had to sit there hour after hour doing nothing. Then he got the idea of tying his lines up and slipping off to the house without his mules knowing he was gone.
This worked well except when the mules would stop once in awhile, and he would have to go start them again. So, next he put his little dog on the plow seat. The dog liked to ride so well that, when the team would begin stopping, he would bark to keep them going.
People could hardly believe their eyes—the very idea—a dog plowing while his master sat on his porch in the shade.