We would arrive at the field before sunrise, even though you weren’t allowed to start picking until a half hour or so after sunrise, the time needed for the cotton to dry from overnight dew. When we got the word, we sprang into action. Wet cotton added weight, so we were anxious to get pickin’ as soon as possible. Fill your sack with as much cotton as you could carry, tote it over your shoulder to the trailer, hang it on the paymaster’s scale, and get paid cash money right then and there, a nickel for every pound. Then, back over your shoulder, up a ten-foot ladder, walk out on a narrow plank spanning the top of the trailer, and empty your sack. When the trailer was nearly full, you could help pack down the cotton by jumping off the narrow plank into the trailer, sort of a “fringe benefit” for us kids.
-Excerpt from the book, p xiii-xiv.
Thank God for evolution! My parents (William and Attie) were Arkansas sharecroppers and ranch hands when we first moved to California. My father was twelve when he saw his first car (1919). Fifty years later (1969), as the world watched Neil Armstrong
set foot on the moon, I called to hear his thoughts. He said, “I don’t believe everything I see on the television, do you?”
I was born September 8, 1946, in Dumas, Arkansas. I was born breech and have had a contrary prospective ever since. Well, so said my
twin brother, who, following standard procedure, was born twenty-five minutes later. Our sister was born three years and two months later. My brother died December 14, 2007. He was my best friend (behind my wife, Linda), and no day passes that I don’t think
about him, miss him, and think that we travel together, have always traveled together, and someday will travel together again (save me a place at the table, bro!).
Today, many religious people would say I’m a heathen in need of redemption. I was baptized a
Christian (Mennonite Brethren), April 14, 1959. Our family started attending the Cutler Bible Chapel shortly after we arrived in California (1951).
We didn’t know it at the time, but we had been investigated, cleared, and given “secret” clearances.
Our first day home on leave, Lonnie got us on with the carpenter he had worked for before we’d joined the Air Force. We worked full time those two weeks and drove to Beale AFB …