Working

by Studs Terkel

  When you get into stone, you’re gettin’ away from the prefabs, you’re gettin’ into the better homes. Usually at this day and age they’ll start into sixty to seventy thousand and run up to about half a million. We’ve got one goin’ now that’s mighty close, three or four hundred thousand. That type of house is what we build.

  The lumber is not near as good as it used to be. We have better fabricating material, such as plywood and sheet rock and things of that sort, but the lumber itself is definitely inferior. Thirty, forty years ago a house was almost entirely made of lumber, wood floors . . . Now they have vinyl, they have carpet, everything, and so on. The framework wood is getting to be of very poor quality.

  But stone is still stone and the bricks are actually more uniform than they used to be. Originally they took a clay bank . . . I know a church been built that way. Went right on location, dug a hole in the ground and formed bricks with their hands. They made the bricks that built the building on the spot.

  Now we’ve got modern kilns, modern heat, the temperature don’t vary. They got better bricks now than they used to have. We’ve got machines that make brick, so they’re made true. Where they used to, they were pretty rough. I’m buildin’ a big fireplace now out of old brick. They run wide, long, and it’s a headache. I’ve been two weeks on that one fireplace.

  The toughest job I ever done was this house, a hundred years old plus. The lady wanted one room left just that way. And this doorway had to be closed. It had deteriorated and weathered for over a hundred years. The bricks was made out of broken pieces, none of ‘em were straight. If you lay ’em crooked, it gets awful hard right there. You spend a lifetime tryin’ to learn to lay bricks straight. And it took a half-day to measure with a spoon, to try to get the mortar to match. I’d have so much dirt, so much soot, so much lime, so when I got the recipe right I could make it in bigger quantity. Then I made it with a coffee cup. Half a cup of this, half a cup of that . . . I even used soot out of a chimney and sweepin’s off the floor. I was two days layin’ up a little doorway, mixin’ the mortar and all. The boss told the lady it couldn’t be done. I said, “Give me the time, I believe I can do it.” I defy you to find where that door is right now. That’s the best job I ever done.

  There’s not a house in this country that I haven’t built that I don’t look at every time I go by. (Laughs.) I can set here now and actually in my mind see so many that you wouldn’t believe. If there’s one stone in there crooked, I know where it’s at and I’ll never forget it. Maybe thirty years, I’ll know a place where I should have took that stone out and redone it but I didn’t. I still notice it. The people who live there might not notice it, but I notice it. I never pass that house that I don’t think of it. I’ve got one house in mind right now. (Laughs.) That’s the work of my hands. ’Cause you see, stone, you don’t prepaint it, you don’t camouflage it. It’s there, just like I left it forty years ago.

  I can’t imagine a job where you go home and maybe go by a year later and you don’t know what you’ve done. My work, I can see what I did the first day I started. All my work is set right out there in the open and I can look at it as I go by. It’s something I can see the rest of my life. Forty years ago, the first blocks I ever laid in my life, when I was seventeen years old. I never go through Eureka—a little town down there on the river—that I don’t look thataway. It’s always there.

  Immortality as far as we’re concerned. Nothin’ in this world lasts forever, but did you know that stone—Bedford limestone, they claim—deteriorates one-sixteenth of an inch every hundred years? And it’s around four or five inches for a house. So that’s gettin’ awful close. (Laughs.)

  BOOK ONE

  WORKING THE LAND

  PIERCE WALKER

  An autumn evening in a southern Indiana farmhouse. The city, Evansville, industrial and distending, is hardly fifteen miles away—and coming on fast.

  It’s a modern, well-appointed house. A grandfather’s clock, tick-tocking, is the one memento of a “country” past. His father and his grandfather worked this land. “My father was born on the same spot this house is sittin’. And I was born here. We tore the old house down.”

  His wife, who has a job in the city, and their fourteen-year-old daughter live with him. His older child, a son, is elsewhere. Though he has a few head of beef cattle, soy beans and corn are his source of income. He describes himself as “a poor farmer.”

  I farm about five-hundred acres. I own in the neighborhood of two-hundred. The rest of it I sharecrop. I give the owners two-fifths and I keep three-fifths. They’re absentee. One would be a doctor. And a bricklayer. One would be a contractor widow. (Glances toward his wife) What would you call Roger? An aeronautical engineer. I guess all of ’em have inherited from their parents. They hold it for an investment. If I owned a lot of farm land myself, if I had that much money, I don’t think I’d be farming it. I’d let somebody else worry with it.

  For a farmer, the return on your investment is so small now that it isn’t really worthwhile. A younger person cannot start farming unless they have help from the father or somebody. ’Cause you have to be almost able to retire a rich man to start out. The only way the farmers are making it today is the ones in business keep getting bigger, to kinda offset the acreage, the margin income. I don’t know what’s gonna happen in the future. I’m afraid it’s gonna get rough in time to come.

  Your cities are moving out, taking the farm land. If you want to stay in the farming business, it’s best not to be too close to the city. But if you’re thinking of disposing of your farm in a few years, why then it’s an advantage, ’cause it’ll be worth a lot more.

  I don’t see how I’ll keep the thing goin’. As I get older and want to slow down . . . Well, that’s one way of looking at it, retirement. It’s either gritting it out or selling. It seems nowadays a lot of ’em do retire and rent it out to a neighbor or somebody. The end of the day, the older you get, the tireder you get.

  City people, they think you’re well off. When they drive by, I hear a lot of comments, ‘cause most of my friends are city people. They drive by and see a big tractor and things settin’ down. They envy me, but they don’t know what’s behind all that.

  Farming, it’s such a gamble. The weather and the prices and everything that goes with it. You don’t have too many good days. It scares when you see how many working days you actually have. You have so many days to get the crop planted and the same in the fall to harvest it. They have this all figured down to the weather and it’s just a few days. You try to beat the weather. It tenses you up. Whether we needed rain or we didn’t need rain, it affects you in different ways. I have seen a time when you’re glad to hear the thunder and lightning. Then again, I’ve wished I didn’t hear it. (Laughs.)

  Mrs. Walker interjects: “In his busy season, every morning when we get up the radio goes on right away so we can get the weather report. About ten to six every morning. We just eagerly listen to this report. In the summer when he isn’t too busy or like in the winter, we never pay too much attention to it. Otherwise, we watch it close.”

  Weather will make ya or break ya. The crops have to have enough moisture. If they don’t have enough, they hurt. If you have too much, it hurts. You take it like you git. There’s nothing you can do about it. You just don’t think too much about it. My wife says it doesn’t bother me too much. Of course, you still worry . . .

  I don’t believe farmers have as much ulcers as business people ‘cause their life isn’t quite as fast. But I’ll say there will be more as times goes on.’Cause farming is changing more. It’s more a business now. It’s getting to be a big business. It’s not the labor any more, it’s the management end of it.

  Your day doesn’t end. A farmer can’t do like, say, a doctor—go out of town for the weekend. He has to stay with it. That’s just one of the things you have to learn to live with. I’d say a majority of the time a farmer, when he comes in at night and goes to bed, he’s tired enough he’s not
gonna have trouble sleepin’. Of course, he’ll get wore down.

  He touches a weary cadence as he recounts a twelve-plus-hour workday in the fall: up at six (an earlier rising in the spring, four thirty-five) . . . “haul my grain to the elevator in town, which takes about an hour and a half . . . combine about three or four loads a day . . . there’s headlights on the combine, so if I start a load, I’ll finish it even though it’s after dark . . . that’ll run from fifteen hundred to two thousand bushel . . . five hunderd bushels a truckload . . . first thing next morning, I’ll take the load to town . . . ”

  In the winter he “loafs,” helping his wife with her housework, preparing the machinery for spring, planning the fertilizer program, and “a lot of book work,” getting all the records up to date for “tax time.”

  We’ll soon be storing the fall harvest. Machinery and a lot of equipment and everything ready to go when the crops mature. That’s the big problem: machinery. Combine, you’re speaking of twenty thousand dollars. And the eight-row planter for the spring, that’s expensive. It’s such a large investment for what small return you really get out of it. You won’t use it but a month or two out of the year.

  My father-in-law helps me an awful lot in the spring and a little in the fall. He drives the tractor for me. My daughter, she drives a tractor when school is out. When I was home there on the farm, there was five children, three boys, and we were on an eighty-acre farm. It took all of us, my father and three boys. You can see the difference machinery plays in it.

  The number of farmers are getting less every day and just seems like it’s getting worse every year. The younger ones aren’t taking over. The majority of the people originated from the farm years ago. But it’s been so long ago that the young ones now don’t realize anything about the farm. What goes with it or anything like that. The gamble that the farmer takes.

  The city people, when they go to the grocery store and the price of meat is raised, they jump up and down. They don’t realize what all is behind that. They’re thinking of their own self. They don’t want to put up that extra money—which I don’t blame them either. The same way when I go to buy a piece of equipment. I go jump up and down.

  Break the dollar down for food and the farmer’s down at the bottom of the list. He’s got the most invested of all but he’s the smallest percentage-wise out of the food dollar. The processors, it seems like that’s the big end of it. The ladies like to buy this ready-prepared and frozen and all that, and that costs ’em.

  And chemicals in farming, it’s getting to be quite expensive. It seems as though we can’t farm without it. They’re tryin’ to outlaw a lot of ’em, but I don’t know. From my end of it, I’d hate to be without ‘em. Seems as though if we didn’t have chemicals, we wouldn’t have crops. It seems like the bugs and the weeds would just about take care of ’em if we didn’t have the chemicals. But I don’t know . . . on the other end, either . . . whether it’s good for our country or not.

  What do you call these—organic farming? They have a lot of good points, but I never did see a large organic farm. They’re just more or less small operators. I don’t think you can do it on a large scale enough to be feeding a nation. You can see many small organic farms. They used to call’em truck farmers. They had routes to town and deliver produce and like that. He more or less retailed his product to individual homes. He just couldn’t get big enough, just like everybody else.

  They’re using airplanes more all the time. We had our corn sprayed this year by a plane—for blight. You hire a plane, he furnishes the material, and he does it for so much an acre. We had it sprayed twice—with fungicide.

  When you get a good crop, that’s more or less your reward. If you weren’t proud of your work, you wouldn’t have no place on the farm. ‘Cause you don’t work by the hour. And you put in a lot of hours, I tell ya. You wouldn’t stay out here till dark and after if you were punchin’ a clock. If you didn’t like your work and have pride in it, you wouldn’t do that.

  You’re driving a tractor all day long, you don’t talk to anyone. You think over a lot of things in your mind, good and bad. You’re thinking of a new piece of equipment or renting more land or buying or how you gonna get through the day. I can spend all day in the field by myself and I’ve never been lonesome. Sometimes I think it’s nice to get out by yourself.

  The grass is greener on the other side of the fence, they say. When I got out of high school I worked one summer in a factory in Evansville. I didn’t like it. I’ve always been glad I worked that one summer. I know what it is to work in a factory for a little while. The money part of it’s good, but the atmosphere, confined. The air and everything like that. I wasn’t used to a smelly factory. They have a certain odor, you don’t have it out in the field.

  I might say I’ve been real lucky in farming. My wife has helped me an awful lot. She’s worked ever since we’ve been married. My girl, she likes it and loves to get out on the tractor. Our boy really worked. He liked the farm and worked from the time he was old enough until he left. He graduated from Purdue last spring. From observing him from the time he grew up, I would say he’d make a good farmer. He’s in Georgia now. He’s in management training. He realized he could make more money in some other position than he can farming. I hope he isn’t putting money ahead of what he really wants to do. He says he likes what he’s doin’, so . . .

  It seems like if they once get out and go to college, there’s very few of’em do come back. They realize that as far as the future and the money could be made from farming, it just wasn’t there. So that was one thing that turned his mind away from it. Of course, he can always change. I’m hoping . . .

  I do believe farmers are going to have to band together a little bit more than they have in the past. Whether it’ll be through a cooperative or a union, I can’t say. The trouble is they’re too much individual for the rest of the country nowadays. You’re bucking against the organized country, it seems like. And the farmers aren’t organized, it seems like.

  The big complaint you hear is that when you take your product to the market, you take what they give you. And when you go buy on the other end, you pay what they say. So you’re at their mercy on both ends, more or less.

  I don’t like to—farmers really don’t want to, deep in their hearts—but when it gets to a certain point, there’s no alternative. ’Cause when a person gets desperate or is about to lose his farm, he’ll do about anything he wouldn’t do otherwise.

  I hate to look at it that way, if the farmer is part of an organization, that would take all the—I wouldn’t say enjoyment, no—but it’d be just like any other business. When you all had to sell at a certain time and all that went with it. But I believe it is going to come to that.

  POSTSCRIPT: “The family farm has never been stronger than it is now, and it has never been better serviced by the Department of Agriculture.”—Earl L. Butz, Secretary of Agriculture, in the keynote speech at the 51st National 4-H Congress (Chicago Sun-Times, November 27, 1972).

  ROBERTO ACUNA

  I walked out of the fields two years ago. I saw the need to change the California feudal system, to change the lives of farm workers, to make these huge corporations feel they’re not above anybody. I am thirty-four years old and I try to organize for the United Farm Workers of America.

  His hands are calloused and each of his thumbnails is singularly cut. “If you’re picking lettuce, the thumbnails fall off ’cause they’re banged on the box. Your hands get swollen. You can’t slow down because the foreman sees you’re so many boxes behind and you’d better get on. But people would help each other. if you’re feeling bad that day, somebody who’s feeling pretty good would help. Any people that are suffering have to stick together, whether they like it or not, whether they be black, brown, or pink.”

  According to Mom, I was born on a cotton sack out in the fields, ‘cause she had no money to go to the hospital. When I was a child, we used to migrate from California to Arizona and back and
forth. The things I saw shaped my life. I remember when we used to go out and pick carrots and onions, the whole family. We tried to scratch a livin’ out of the ground. I saw my parents cry out in despair, even though we had the whole family working. At the time, they were paying sixty-two and a half cents an hour. The average income must have been fifteen hundred dollars, maybe two thousand.9

  This was supplemented by child labor. During those years, the growers used to have a Pick-Your-Harvest Week. They would get all the migrant kids out of school and have ‘em out there pickin’ the crops at peak harvest time. A child was off that week and when he went back to school, he got a little gold star. They would make it seem like something civic to do.

  We’d pick everything: lettuce, carrots, onions, cucumbers, cauliflower, broccoli, tomatoes—all the salads you could make out of vegetables, we picked ’em. Citrus fruits, watermelons—you name it. We’d be in Salinas about four months. From there we’d go down into the Imperial Valley. From there we’d go to picking citrus. It was like a cycle. We’d follow the seasons.

  After my dad died, my mom would come home and she’d go into her tent and I would go into ours. We’d roughhouse and everything and then we’d go into the tent where Mom was sleeping and I’d see her crying. When I asked her why she was crying she never gave me an answer. All she said was things would get better. She retired a beaten old lady with a lot of dignity. That day she thought would be better never came for her.

  “One time, my mom was in bad need of money, so she got a part-time evening job in a restaurant. I’d be helping her. All the growers would come in and they’d be laughing, making nasty remarks, and make passes at her. I used to go out there and kick ‘em and my mom told me to leave ’em alone, she could handle ’em. But they would embarrass her and she would cry.