Everybody Loves Raymond – Except Dad!

In 1947 I was 4 years old. My dad had two cotton patches at that time. One patch was about 35 acres in the post oaks and another one about 45 acres lower down in “the bottom.” The patch in the post oak area ran alongside a country road which is now Munke Road. On the other side of this road were about 8 or 10 houses full of families each with a lot of kids to each family. One of the houses belonged to a family by the name of S.T. Slack. He had four daughters and four sons, all of cotton-picking age. When dad needed cotton pickers all they had to do was to cross the fence and they were ready to pick cotton for us.

One of these boys was a strapping young man about 18 or 20 years of age. He was very muscular and could pick up to 300-400 lbs. of cotton per day. The only problem was that he picked cotton so fast that in the process he would tend to pull even the green bolls and leaves and put them into the pick sack. Dad called him the sloppiest picker around because of the extra debris that was included in his cotton. This green mess of leaves and cotton bolls, when ginned with the cotton, would tend to stain the white cotton and produce an inferior sample once taken from the bale. This would affect the price the cotton buyer paid for that bale. Dad would take Raymond to the side and lecture him on how “not to pick cotton.” Evidently Raymond had a wind tunnel between his ears cause no matter how much dad lectured him, it seemed like he was just talking to the wind. He really couldn’t fire him because he knew the whole family of Slacks would go pick cotton elsewhere.

Another pet peeve about Raymond was that he usually picked two rows at a time and by the time he picked two rows there and two rows back, his six to eight foot long pick sack got pretty full. Being somewhat lazy instead of picking up his sack midway back and emptying it he would sit on the ground and putting his feet into the full sack, he would grab onto the end and compress the cotton as tight as he could to make more room. That sack of cotton weighed over l00 lbs. when he finally reached the end of his rows. It was packed so tight that after being weighed, dad had the hardest time trying to empty the sack into the trailer or truck. I can still see him throwing that full sack over his shoulder and shaking and shaking till he finally got it all emptied. Like I said, “everybody loved Raymond” – except Dad!