Drive - A Memoir 60th Installment
theory
of everything as he was doing the work, and he would explain a lot of
other relative knowledge to boot. This hands on, learning by doing,
and learning by watching, is the schooling most people never have.
Vern would say, “You buy them books and buy them books; all they do
is eat the covers. People out of college are ‘educated fools’
that can’t do
anything!” It was our belief that he could
do anything, and we were learning from the master. Years earlier when
he grew potatoes, he had invented and built a potato combine before
they were manufactured commercially.
One
time I was goofing around close by when Tommy was at the farm helping
work on the wood splitter. I always hung around these two guys
because I loved to watch them work and listen to them discuss what
would work and what wouldn’t work.
“I
understand, talking to Barney, that your potato harvester was in use
long before the ‘Spudnik’ company rolled out theirs,” Tommy
said to Vernon.
“The
potato harvester I made was a little different. The digger didn’t
have huge fans blowing dirt and vines all over the workers. I think
my harvester had a better way of separating the vines and debris from
the potatoes than theirs could.”
“How’d
that work?” Tom asked.
“I
had double digging fore shares and mould boards that separated the
vines from the potatoes right at ground level and pushed the vines
off to the sides; the vines and most clods didn’t enter into the
harvester at all. The field cleaning and sacking was easily handled
by one operator.”
“Okay,
why didn’t you start a company and sell your potato harvesters?”
Tommy added. “I would have thrown in as a partner.”
“Good
question,” Vernon didn’t need to think about it long. “Man is
the most legalistic and dangerous living organism in the world, and I
trust mother nature far more than I trust man. I would rather be a
farmer in a hail storm than a businessman in a court room.”
Tommy
added, “If you work hard fighting Mother Nature you can still come
out okay. In a court of law, you lose if you lose, and you lose if
you win!”
Vern,
putting on his disgusted face like he smelled something bad, said,
“Man just sues good people and lives off the sewage!” they both
laughed.
This
was good and strange to me. I don’t see the Old Man happy too
often, this is good, and I have heard him laugh even less than I’ve
seen him smile.
Tommy
had come over to pick up the wood splitter he and Vern had built.
They had found an older hay baler and had taken off or cut off pretty
much everything except the bale chamber, the plunger and the wheels.
They opened up the rear top of the chamber, and at the exit end, they
500 more words tomorrow
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