Working on a Farm to Pay for Tuition

Tom: I worked on the farm, and they made me the truck driver. So I drove the truck. It was a dairy farm — they had a dairy farm then. And I hauled, on the truck, a bunch of boys would load the truck up with rocks, and that’s the foundation for a lot of the farms up there today. But they don’t use it anymore; I don’t even know what it’s for.

Mostly interested in sports, more than anything. And unfortunately grades had come down the line for me.

But the place was heated by a coal furnace heater. And we had to go to Murphy, North Carolina, to haul the coals down from there. So I spent about half the summer shoveling coals. And I got to be where I could — boy, I mean I was strong. And so on the working gang, the fertilizer came in a 200-pound sack. I could take that 200-pound sack, put it on my shoulder, and walk off with it. Now I couldn’t pick it up and raise it up this way and come up, so they had to help me get it up. And we had to fertilize some rows, where we put the fertilizer down, so I put the 200-pound sack on my shoulder, and one of them would cut a hole in the back of it and I walked down the row and it would just drizzle, and we got done with that job in just nothing flat.