Anybody else remember the saying “sunup to sundown”?
I grew up hearing my grandpa telling me about how when he was younger, he used to work from sunup to sundown in the fields. He used to boast that kids today would kill themselves if they had to endure the hours and conditions that he did.
Now, a year or so after his death, I reflect on his stories: I work more hours in a day than he did at my age, and for lower wages and benefits. He worked sunup to sundown to afford a relatively stable life with multiple kids and a house; I work from 8 AM to 10 PM at two jobs so my wife and I can scrape by. This doesn’t account for the fact that I wake up at 6:45 so I can make it to work on time, 40 miles away. My only day off is Sunday, which I mostly use to take care of my widowed grandmother (his wife).
I wonder if he was born 22 years ago instead of in 1937, if he would kill himself under current working conditions?
Posted Mar 2, 2022, 3:33 AM UTC · edited
A lot of pre-agribusiness farm labor was 18 hour days….. for like 3 months out of the year. Once the crops are planted all you do is wait
The stories he told (besides from his
boomersilent generation takes on the new generations or whatever) were quite interesting.He basically worked on what I assume to have been a former plantation. There were houses on-site for the workers, and the farm was pretty much self-sustaining (not in a good way). It had its own bar, general store, etc… All owned by the people that owned the farm.
The reason I suspect it to have been a former plantation is that whenever he talked about the place, he called it the “Plunkett Farm”… No one family owned all that land in rural Arkansas at the time without being descended from the slave-owning planter class.
(1937 would be silent generation, not boomer.)
Fair point
This is just a nostalgic post because you mentioned 'silent generation':
That strikes me a little (no disrespect to the comment), my paternal grandfather had throat-cancer surgery, about 7 years before I was born, so he also of course had a hole in his throat (like the silly hunter from southpark). He never could use the speaker-thing to amplify his voice, and me having a severe speech impediment myself growing up (until about 9), we learned to communicate to each other with motions to our speech.
Fast forward about 25 years, and my half-sis claimed his purple-heart from WW2 (we had a falling out about inheritances) , but she doesn't know how he earned it; he told me when I was a child, and despite my dad and I going into military service, we can't hold a candle to what Cyril did during his military time.
You're absolutely right the farm he worked on was a former plantation. They took advantage of good ol "share cropping."
It was one of the ways they kept basically slavery around after the Civil War before we change to the prison industrial complex.
Feels good to be right
Feels gross to know that the Plunketts are still very well to do in that town, though.
I feel like you’d be really interested in the show Queen Sugar.
Yeah harvest used to pay for the winter off. It's grueling work when you need to work but half the year is spent waiting on the other half to take its course.
Um, no, running a farm is a year round business. Especially if you have animals, they're every day work. Also there's plenty to be done during growing season, not just the intensive harvest months, weeding, fertilizing, pesticide application. Plus you have to plow, aerate, and plant before anything else. And usually different crops have different growing seasons, some you start early some start later, so you're busy and doing things for about 8-10 months, not 3.
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Someone still has to milk Ol' Flossy though