My First Job Away from Home

What happened after my operation and seeing President Roosevelt made the rest of the summer memorable for me. I was hired on my first job away from home! The wheat allotment program was started in that summer of 1934. Because of the poor prices of wheat, the government was paying farmers money to let part of their wheat land lie idle, thus reducing production, and driving up the price of wheat. Under the program, each farmer contracted with the government to grow only so many acres of wheat, that acreage being significantly less than that of the previous years. Not trusting the farmers, the government determined that the land each farmer had planted to wheat must be measured, to make certain there was no cheating, no planting of extra acres of wheat.
A man from Hinsdale, a stranger to us, came to our place one day in early July, when we were haying. He came down to the hayfield where we were working, and asked for me! His name was George Nelson. He explained that he had been awarded the contracts to measure the wheat lands in a large part of Valley County, and needed someone to help him with the work. He had inquired at the high school, and was told that I was good in mathematics, and would be good help. He offered me great wages, for a kid who had never had a job away from home before: 50 cents for each farm that we measured, plus board and room! I would stay with him and his wife and little boy, and we would be working for a month or more. It sounded good to me, and with my Dad's permission, I agreed to work for him. Right on the spot he gave me money for train fare to go to Glasgow. He would meet me there in two days, and we would get started!
Wow! I was excited! I had never gone on a train trip alone (I had never been on a train since I was an infant), and had never before worked or lived away from home. I carefully chose what clothing I would need, and caught the little local passenger-mail-freight train in Hinsdale on the appointed day. I was thrilled to be riding on the train, and looked out of the window at our place as we went by. It was great fun. When I arrived at Glasgow (only a 30-mile ride), sure enough, there was Mr. Nelson waiting for me.
We drove out to his place in his Model A Ford sedan, in which I was to ride many miles in the next few weeks. He was renting a farm house just five miles out of Glasgow at that time. He told me we would be moving back to his farm northeast of Hinsdale after the first couple of weeks of work. First we had to go to a training class the next day, to learn how to do the measuring, and keep the required records.
I surely remember that evening, as I was already homesick. After all, I was only fifteen years old! Mrs. Nelson served us a good supper (she was a very good cook!). Then I walked alone down to the river bank, and threw rocks for a while, then just sat and watched as it got dark. Nothing bad had happened, but I surely wished that I were back at home!
The training class was fun. I was the only youngster there--all the others were grown men. We were issued our equipment--a wheelbarrow contraption, with a big front wheel that gave a loud click each time the wheel made a complete revolution. That was George's tool; he had to count the revolutions of the wheel. Knowing the circumferance of the wheel, we could then calculate the length of each side of the fields we were to measure.
George would carry a bundle of stakes on the wheelbarrow, to mark the corners of the fields. He would go ahead around each field, writing down the length of each side of the field. He set a stake at each corner. My job was a bit more technical, and this was where my knowledge of geometry fitted in. My "instrument" was a crude transit, made without any lenses. It consisted of a sharply pointed piece of steel three-quarter inch pipe, with a flat little table set on top, at right angles to the pole. On the table was a metal device that could be rotated in a full circle. On the top of the table was a graduated circle, showing the degrees from 0 to 360.
In use, I would set the pole in the ground, as nearly vertical as I could judge simply by looking at it, and close to the stake George had left. Then I would sight through a narrow slot in the metal device back to the last stake we had left, sometimes as much as a mile away. Next I would set the compass to zero, then swing the metal device around and sight it on the stake at the next corner, which George would have left. Then I read and recorded the angle of the corner where I stood. It required good eyesight, which happily I had in those days. Though simple, it was really an accurate device.
When we had been completely around a field, I would draw a diagram of the field, showing the distances on each side, and the angles of the corners. Here was where my geometry helped a lot. Lots of fields were anything but square--some had five or six sides. Fortunately, none were round! With what I knew of geometry, I could make a quick check to see if our measurements and angles were within the degree of accuracy required for the work. This data, for each field we measured on each farm (often several fields), was sent in to the County Agent's office for checking of the actual acreage against that farmer's contract. If our data was not accurate, we would be required to go back and remeasure that particular field. I'm glad to say that of our contracts that summer, we had to go back and remeasure only two fields--and on one of those fields our previous measurements were proved to be correct!
George really appreciated my knowledge of math, for he was totally unable to handle the calculations. He used to brag about me to the other allotment people; I was pretty proud. George believed in putting in good long days. We would leave his place early in the morning, with a plan for the day, going from one farm to another with the least amount of wasted time and mileage. We would check in with the farmer, or, if no one was at home, leave a note and go to work. George was a wheat farmer himself, and we had few troubles.
Although we always carried sack lunches with us, George would try to work things out so that we could either arrive or just be finishing at a farm about noon. Often we were invited to eat with the farm family, and enjoyed some mighty nice meals! I can recall a few of those special days. One day we were at the farm of our old neighbor on the homestead, John Goodmanson. He was a bachelor, so no meal was expected there. To top it off, John wasn't at home! We were desperate for something cool and liquid, so we simply went into his house, found a can of tomatoes in his cupboard, and consumed that. George left a note and some small change to pay for the food. In those days almost no one had a lock on their house door, and, if they had, wouldn't leave the house locked. We trusted each other completely.
On another day, we arrived at the farm house at just the right time. The farmer was away, but his wife invited us to take "pot luck" with her and the family, a swarm of little kids. Neither George nor I had previously met this lady. We sat down to a simple meal of meat stew and bread and butter. It was without question one of the best stews I had ever eaten! We both had two or three helpings.
Then, when we were satisfied, and George and this lady were enjoying a cup of coffee (I was too young for coffee!), she mentioned casually: "We sure hated to lose that colt; it got tangled up in some barb wire, and my husband had to shoot it. No use wasting good meat, though!" We didn't miss the point: we had been enjoying horse stew! So far as I know, that was the first time I had ever eaten horse meat, or even heard of people eating it. It was good, and the fact that it was horse didn't bother me at all.
With good luck we could measure the fields on three, or sometimes four farms each day. Because we knew exactly how far it was around each field, we calculated that we were walking twenty-five to thirty miles most days! It was really interesting work, and I enjoyed it. For me, the earning of $1.00 or maybe $2.00 in a day was like being in clover!
There were some disadvantages of the whole set-up, though. After we moved back to George's farm, about six miles east and a bit north of Hinsdale, I found I had nothing to do evenings. There were lots of gophers around, but I didn't have my .22 there, so couldn't shoot them, as I would have liked. I hadn't brought any books with me, and thus had nothing to read except some old pulp magazines the Nelsons had in their attic, mostly Wild West and detective stories. I didn't much like such reading materal at first, but became interested after a short time. Before my working time was over, I became enthusiastic about westerns, and read stacks of them.
George and his wife liked to get away from home evenings, and pretty often I found myself riding herd on their little boy, Billy. He wasn't a bad youngster, but he required much attention. I would walk around the farm with him, then read to him until he got sleepy, and then put him to bed. After that I could have some time to read what I wanted to. I was usually too tired to sit up late, though.
One interesting thing about George's house--they had Aladdin lamps. At home we had always had simple old kerosene wick lamps, so I had never had any experience with the much better lighting that the Aladdin lamps produced. The lamps made a soft hissing sound, as they worked with air pressure, and produced light from a mantle, similar to the mantles of gasoline lanterns.
George believed in a six-day work week, so I didn't get to go home but once or twice during the five or six weeks I worked with him that summer. I felt quite grown up, I guess, and really wasn't very homesick after the first few days. Going from farm to farm I often saw young people with whom I had gone to school, and that helped. Some of them were girls, and George was always teasing me of having very wrong interests in those girls. That embarrassed me no end, because I was too shy to talk to a girl, and certainly didn't have any girl friends.
One thing I enjoyed on some of our work days was shooting sage hens (sage grouse) for the table. George, like most other folks in those days, paid no attention to game laws. He usually had his big old twelve guage shotgun tucked away in the back seat of the car, under our measuring devices and boxes of records. When we would spot a bunch of young sage hens, with their mother hen, George would stop, get the gun out, load it, and carefully use one shot to kill two or three of the young birds. He didn't want to shoot the old birds, which were too old and tough to eat, and he didn't do any fancy wing shooting, either. He shot for meat. He would wait until several young birds would be bunched together, with their necks stretched out, looking at us, and then shoot into the bunch. We would do a quick job of field dressing the birds, and take them home to eat. Mrs. Nelson was always glad to have them to cook.
Well, the day came when we finished all our contracts, took our equipment back to Glasgow to the County Extension Agent's office, and were done with wheat measurement for that year. George asked me to plan to work with him again the next year, and I said I would. I don't remember just what I did with the money he paid me, but it seemed to me to be a small fortune. I probably bought clothing, and saved the rest. Our parents always encouraged us to save as much as we possibly could. I went back to work with my Dad, doing chores, helping with the tending and irrigating of our large garden, and the late cutting of hay.