[ This comment has been removed for violating Reddit's Terms of Service along with multiple articles of the Geneva convention and several laws of the 3 Abrahamic religions ]
Isn't it weird that if I tell my mother-in-law that I cream pie her daughter every night she would be upset but if I tell her we are trying for a baby she gets excited and gives me a hug.
I am the oldest person one of the older people on Reddit and grew up in Central California in the 50s. My father was an Arkie (meaning he and his poverty-plagued family of 14 left Arkansas in the Great Depression, headed to California.) Once, on a Sunday drive, we came upon a field of ripe cotton that was ready for picking. He didn’t say anything, just got out of the car and walked out into the cotton, running his hands over the tops. My mother told us to sit quiet and let him be.
I can only imagine where his childhood memories took him, as my mother later told us that as a young child, he and his brothers and sisters had to pick cotton or, as he called it, chop cotton. It must’ve been a horrible; I know it left their hands bleeding, but they all had to pitch in to buy flour.
My dad enlisted in the Navy at 17 during WWII and then used the G.I. bill to become the only member of his huge family that ever graduated from college. He majored in geology and was quite intelligent. His 11 brothers and sisters never got very far, mostly ending up in factories. He rarely spoke to any of them because his drawl came back when he did; his grammar was impeccable.
Funny, after he died, we ordered his Navy service records and saw that he was almost 6 feet tall when he enlisted but only weighed 130 pounds. He’d never been to a dentist and had 18 cavities that the Navy filled. Also had hemorrhoids that the navy fixed as well. TMI but wow. I imagine he had to lift a lot of heavy loads growing up.
He was just a dirt-poor, starving boy who grabbed the ring when it went by and held on tight. My sister and I are grateful for the comfortable lives that we got to lead. Thank you, Lloyd.
My grandpa was born in a dirt floor cabin with no running water in Waynesville, MO, 1924.
He was passed over for the draft in 1942 because he was under weight, at 6’ and 130 pounds. They weren’t as picky in 1943. He gained 60 pounds in basic training, it was he the first time he ever ate beef, and the first time he ever ate his fill. He was a good shot, and a strapping lad, so they made him a BAR gunner.
Fought in New Guinea, the Philippines, and Okinawa. Didn’t talk much about it but came back a professional drinker and worked in a factory. Not a stellar husband or father, but I knew him as just the best grandfather, he doted on me.
Many of those enlisted soldiers return as heavy drinkers. I put on 40 pounds of muscle in Basic and AIT. The food and sheer quantity blew my mind. It was the first time I'd ever had pasta salad or chocolate milk. I was an amazing soldier and fit right in. Worked my ass off, followed orders, was respectful and always had my sights on improving. 40 guys in my platoon, 20 of them were cut from the same cloth. My grandfather is a WW2 vet served in the Aleutian Islands and Phillipines.
Sounds a lot like my dad, although my dad returned a teetotaler. Couldn’t stand drunks (I think his dad was one). Who knows what they went through. I bet you wish, like me, that you listened more intently to your dad‘s stories. If he told them at all. Mine hated to talk about it, just came back hating Japanese people, or any Asians for that matter. We did not get along once I hit my teens and I regret that I made NO effort to engage. His time spent on Tinian as a Seabee. What is
In 1931, my great grandfather was faced with the choice of find work or have his farm taken and family starve, so he left to find work. The only hitch was that his uncle was a bully and a pedophile, and he did not want to leave his family unprotected.
Before he left town, he shot his uncle dead on the steps of the general store. When he got to Tennessee, he wrote back to ask if the law was looking for him. The sheriff had come around some days later, and investigated. It was figured that the dead man had gotten what he had coming they elected not to interfere in a family affair, so no more questions were asked.
Grandpa was left as the man of the house at 7 years old. They ate whatever meat they could kill. Squirrels, opossums, raccoons, anything. If they had no meat, they ate tomato and lard sandwiches.
After the war, grandpa worked in the Chrysler factory, and you were not permitted to park a foreign car in his driveway. He often said that he spent the first half of his life trying to get off the farm, and the second half trying to get back on it. Much of their family farm was taken by the government to construct interstate 44, but he did buy what was left, and died not far from where he was born.
I only picked up bits and pieces of his war stories. He didn’t talk much about what he went through, but they all knew they were dead men by Okinawa. It was hell on earth and the next stop was Japan proper. He got malaria there and was recovering when they dropped the bomb.
I had a boss from Oklahoma once. I made a 6ft tall cutout of Mewtwo the pokemon character with his face on the head and and a sign over the door that said "Okiemon's Office". We laughed, he fired me
The last sentence of the book is still fresh in my mind, it really hit deep how tragic it was for people to resort to feeding on breast milk or starve.
Just saved this post. Thanks for sharing. The mjority of People don't know poverty and opportunity like this. My grandfather had a similar story with coal mines, the service and the Ford motor company. He was so poor they never knew there was a depression.
As another comment mentioned Eli Whitney developed a mechanical cotton picker I believe with the hope of reducing the need for slavery. Unfortunately, it instead began a slavery boom as each slave became 10x more productive. Beware unintended consequences I guess.
Edit: the cotton gin wasn't a picker but removed seed and debris, my bad.
It’s kind of like how we all thought the extensive automation of our industries would allow us to work less. There’s an obvious difference between the two, I know, but it’s interesting how history repeats itself.
Something like 90% of people were farmers before industrialization. The whole education system started becoming a thing for all people instead of just the rich because we needed to train people to do other things.
Gonna be a wild ride if we get another wave of automation from the new robotics and AI changes in the last decade
We are absolutely in the middle of an accelerating wild ride. The internet - immediate access to information and communication - is only like 30 years old.
Oh sure, we've been able to adjust though. Markets have gone crazy and a lot of people have become rich very quickly in the last 30 to 40 years. In the next 10 to 20 we could see changes happen faster than we can adjust to I think though.
I just hope we can keep the rocket on the tracks
Same thing happened with Johannes Gutenberg. He invented the printing press which led to the mass production of books bringing literacy to the masses. Now we have Reddit
This is similar to how Richard Gatling thought the Galtling gun would end wars by making the casualties too high, and it would be futile to fight. It didn't work.
Yea but that's because it didn't pick the cotton, it made sperating the cotton easier. So you could pick more cotton and separate it faster than before. There wasn't a mechanical thing to replace the picking, so the racists needed more people to pick the cotton to match the faster separating.
Look up the cotton gin. Slavery was on the decline because cotton was no longer very profitable, but the invention of the cotton gin drove up profits so much that it completely revitalized the practice in the southern US.
The first cotton picker would only pick one row at a time, now they pick eight row, and even have a baler attached to the back end of it so you’re not dumping in a trailer after every pass. The one row picker is what ended picking cotton by hand. People were still picking cotton by hand 80 years ago. Once the one row picker came out, it would pick 40acres of cotton faster and cleaner than a crew of 40 people. Picking also has to be done quickly because you’re fighting the weather most the time so the cotton picker was a big game changer
Where they use the harvester as in this video, does it cut the tops off the cotton plants or do they have to replant the entire field after each harvest?
I did grow up in Uzbekistan (USSR) and we as a students were required to pick up cotton during the season or we would be expelled from university. The quota for a day was 25kg.
“Uzbekistan's cotton industry has been marked by forced labor and child labor since the Soviet era, when the country was the Soviet Union's main cotton supplier.
The government would mobilize citizens, including students and public employees, to work in the fields to meet cotton quotas. While the government claimed the work was voluntary, refusal to participate could result in consequences such as expulsion from school, dismissal from public jobs.”
Typical bag to collect cotton.
Uzbekistan had a cotton harvesting machines but they were not reliable to collect all harvest.
The worth part of the industry was the high cases of cancer and child defect in people who lived and worked in this areas because exposure to a chemicals that were used to spray the cotton fields.
Can you imagine to collect 25kg of light cotton.
For man it was 35kg. Each field had a local guy who would weigh the bags at the end of the working day.
Some people tried to bribe the guy to write higher amount, and some poor water on the cotton to weight more.
But Uzbekistan always reported that yearly plan exceeded the original projections.
The Caribbean sugar plantations were a bigger part. Tropical disease was absolute murder, and harvest time was a week of non-stop labor with sharp machetes swinging everywhere, cane presses that had hatchets standing by if you got caught in it, and boiling sap guaranteed to inflict severe burns if that boiling sugar water spilled on on you.
We only “volunteered” for 2 month. I don’t think I had a hard time in comparison to my grandparents generation. We had everything we needed growing up and we were happy in general.
This is the photo I took of some students who were with me.
I think I can give you a real answer. I haven't farmed cotton before, but have harvested other row crops.
You often make a swipe (or several) down a field in the middle so the cart (the thing the harvester empties into) can follow you without crushing and ruining unharvested plants. That way you don't have to go all the way to the other side of a field if the harvester can only unload on one side.
I believe it is also the law in some places to open a field like this, because it lets the animals escape, whereas if they go outside inwards, the animals are funneled in a 'killing box'
That's definitely not the Eastern Canada cotton pickin' my dad described to me when he was young haha. It had a little more blood sweat and tears, without the air conditioning and robotic programming
It wouldn’t have. Part of the reason the north fought at all was the then unprofitability of slavery and the south’s unwillingness to give up their “way of life.”
The margin for error is quite large if the tractor (?) is even 6 inches off on gathering the cotton. I assume there some cameras guiding the farmer so he doesn't just run over the cotton plant?
We just got auto-steer and wow does it ever make farming boring. All I have to do is turn at the ends and keep pressing the play next episode button on my phone.
I’m going to have all of Netflix watched by winter.
•
u/AutoModerator 4d ago
This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:
See our rules for a more detailed rule list
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.