Don’t Compress My Picked Cotton!

In 1949 I was six years old. My dad farmed about eighty acres of cotton. At harvest time he would park his Model A truck along the turning row of the patch and as the hired cotton pickers had their sack full of cotton weighed, he would empty all of this cotton into the truck bed. The truck bed had four foot high side boards on it and once this space was filled to a certain level, Dad would guess he had enough loose cotton on board to take it to the gin and have it processed into a bale. Usually he kept track of the pounds of cotton emptied into this truck. But on some occasions he wasn’t around on certain days when he moved houses and my mom did the weighing. I wasn’t but six years old at the time but I do remember Dad saying that he had to be careful as not to bring too much cotton to the gin because a regular bale weighed about 400 to 500 lbs. I guess there was a formula to follow as to how many pounds of raw cotton it took to yield 400 lbs. of pure ginned cotton. One had to subtract the cotton seed and other debris that was extracted by the ginning process.

Anyway, once he figured out how much space he had filled in this huge truck bed, he came pretty close to guessing the right amount to go with. Here is where the problem arose. One day during the weekend my cousin, Jimmy Joe Kana, came to visit. After playing ball and doing all the usual things we normally did together, we found ourselves climbing onto this partially filled truck bed with loose cotton in it. We amused ourselves jumping from the cab of the truck into this soft spongy heavenly cloud of cotton!

Since the truck was parked in a large barn I even climbed the roof rafters and did a few swan dives into that soft yielding pool of heavenly bliss. Well everything was fine until Dad took this load to the gin. The first problem arose when the man controlling the large vacuum chute couldn’t get the cotton to turn loose. He lamented to Dad that it was packed too tight. He had to use a short handled fork turned at a right angle to chop and pull the cotton loose enough to be vacuumed up into his chute. Next problem was when he finished unloading all that packed cotton, Mr. Hausmann, the ginner, was cursing on the other side of the gin about his hydraulic press grunting and straining to compress all that extra cotton being ginned. I suppose all of the finished bales of cotton had to be compressed to a certain size no matter what their weight was.

Anyway, after this unpleasant episode at the gin, I guess Dad figured it out and forbade us kids to ever jump around on his loose cotton again. Oh well, they were some good times while they lasted! But still on some occasions as he was driving the truck home from the field, I would ride in back and still do one or two backward somersaults into that soft cotton. I figured one or two extra flips couldn’t hurt that much!