I Was Compost When Compost Wasn't Cool

AuthorHouse

Contents

Forward........................................................3Introduction...................................................5The Early Years................................................13Hay, Campbell Soup, And College................................25Family Growers And Campbell Soup...............................39Death, Farming, And The Ladies.................................51Compost Products; Birth And Death..............................61Life After The Mushroom........................................77Machinery, Innovation, And Imagination.........................97More Machinery And More Memories...............................111More People And More Problems..................................125Stable Bedding And Customers...................................137My Next Forty Years............................................145Acknowledgments; My List Of Most Respected.....................153

Chapter One

My two brothers and I all started out at about age seven or eight working for the local Greek truck farmers. There was about ten or twelve families around the Joliet area that produced a lot of fresh vegetables in the summer and "trucked" them to the Water Street Market in Chicago for sale. There were also a lot of summer jobs for kids that wanted to work. We would weed onions, pick green and yellow beans, pick lettuce, endive, asparagus, kohlrabi, beets, turnips, and tomatoes most of the time on our hands and knees. We would reap a solid thirty five to forty cents per hour. Not bad for the late fifties and I think this is where the government got the idea for minimum wage in this country.

My oldest brother got a job with Caterpillar in Joliet after he finished high school. Not long after he got hired, he was drafted by the army for a two year tour of duty that landed him mainly in Germany. When he came back, he went straight back to his same job at Caterpillar that he had left two years earlier. He also got involved with restoring old Chevy cars and has a collection of vintage automobiles who's value is doing much better than my stock market portfolio. He retired when he was only fifty two and he and his wife enjoy traveling and working with all his old cars.

My middle brother worked for the local ammunition plant making bombs after high school. After a few years there, he enlisted in the army for three years stationed in France for most of the time. After he came home, he got married and settled about twenty miles south of Joliet working at about four or five different jobs in the area. When the government decided to build the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery near Elwood, Illinois, my brother was the first to be hired and the first to be fired.

At this cemetery, when a single body is buried, the hole is dug about six foot deep. After digging, the operator jumps into the hole to square the corners up so the coffin will fit just right. When there is going to be two buried in the same hole, the operator digs down nine feet, places a protective devise around the hole so the dirt walls will not cave in on him or her when squaring the corners up. He was digging one of these deep holes and the boss came by and said, "there was not enough time to get and use one of the protective devises". My brother would not enter the hole without it, and got fired. He tried to appeal his dismissal to a local politician, but never got any satisfaction as the politician himself was charged with improprieties in Washington about the same time. My brother was fortunate to find another job, and moved on.

My sister, beside helping mom with the all the house chores, got a job near the high school when she was just a freshman. Four months after high school she got married, and lives only about a half mile from where she grew up.

She and I were only thirteen months apart in age. We did everything together most of are early years. One of the worst days occurred when she was about five years old. We were out near the garden and I was chopping down old cornstalks with of all things, an axe. For some unknown reason, she bent down in front of the path of the swinging axe and got struck in the head. I was mortified with her crying and the blood coming out of the cut on her head. We both ran into the house with a trail of blood left behind all the way from the garden and up the back steps. Mom calmly placed a cold wet rag over the cut, the bleeding stopped, and we all considered her very lucky.

The older I got, the more my physical labors drifted to local farmers who needed help baling and stacking hay, shelling corn out of corn cribs, and walking soybean fields to pull weeds and volunteer corn out between the rows. In the winter, I would hitchhike into Joliet and shovel driveways and sidewalks, and in the summer I would mow grass for some extra money. Some of the hardest work was picking sweet corn by hand early in the morning when all the dew was still on the plants. You would get soaking wet from the armpits down and no way to dry off. In 1958, I bought my first new bike with money earned picking green beans. I washed and waxed it almost everyday. I did make one mistake by riding it to my friends farm that had goats. The bike came with one foot long brightly colored streamers coming out of the handle bars that the goats found very tasty.

I might have had a little glimpse of compost at that early age by seeing some old rotten hay in the corner of the barn or by noticing that the pile of grass on the property line never got any bigger no matter how much grass I cut and piled there. I did realize that both produced an odor when they were disturbed.

I attended the local high school, but because of rheumatic fever in the winter of my eight grade and a wonderful agriculture teacher, I was able to leave school around one o'clock each day if I wanted for work related purposes. The school would not let me take physical education because of insurance reasons connected with the fever. That combined with study hall at the end of the day, meant I could leave after one pm if I wanted to.

Ron Deininger, my high school Agriculture teacher, would become a very important part of my life but did not realize it as a freshman. He was about fifteen years older than me. He never stopped working for as long as I have known him. He taught high school agriculture related classes during the day, drivers education during the afternoon and weekends, raised hogs and farmed at night and early morning before class. If chores for the hogs were part of the routine for that particular morning, hog manure could sometimes be smelled in the classroom. He was also our "FFA", Future Farmers of America, advisor for all four years. He pushed all the kids he had contact with to our limits each day. The biggest regret I had was not buying land as he suggested to do all the time. Over the years, he and his son and daughter have become very successful in their purchase of property.

One of the biggest highlight while in high school was being a part of the FFA. The high school was set in a rural atmosphere at the time I was attending. There were a lot of students from the rural areas around the east side of Joliet probably totaling about fifteen percent of the total enrolment. There was a...