Fifty Cents For a Half Day of Work?

I was about eight years old when on certain summer days; I was summoned to walk up the hill to my uncle’s hay patch to help him with baling the hay. He had the only hay press for miles around and also did custom baling for most of his neighbors. The hay press would be positioned by a huge pile of loose hay. Then a gasoline engine operated the baler as hay was pitch-forked into an open box at the top. As the hay was compressed and moved along to the back of the machine, one person would stick wire through a slot in a wooden separator block positioned between each bale to separate them. The wire had to completely go around the bale, so the person had to walk around to the other side or lean way over to get the job done. This is where my job came in. All I had to do was stand there all day and when the wire came through the block separating the bales, I had to pull it out a little further and insert it into the front block slot. Then the tie-person would take both ends of the wire and wrap them together tying the compressed hay into a bale.

Here is where the problem started. Occasionally, when the hay got short or fuzzy, it would overlap the block slot and the slot could not be readily located. In some instances, I would stick the wire through the wrong slot, thus tying the block to the bale as it exited the machine tube. Then the whole process had to be stopped and the person tying, usually my Uncle John Cernoch, had to untie the bale and extract the wooden block. Needless to say he wasn’t too happy doing this.

Anyway, for all the time I spent helping him, he gave me a silver half-dollar! Boy was I happy! I ran almost all the way home with that 50-cent piece in my dusty pocket. When I got home, I showed my dad the coin and, guess what, he took the coin from me and I never saw it again! I suppose he put it into some piggy bank for me but I would much rather have kept it for myself to enjoy.