Regulations being considered by the U.S. Department of Labor to restrict what youths may do on farms would have affected the meager finances my buddies and I had in the 1950s.
The unfolding regulations, a lightning rod for ag organizations and Kansas Sens. Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts, are meant with good intentions, but you have to wonder where they will go in the bureaucratic morass. And, if adopted, how they’re going to be enforced without a new army of government agents.
In a nutshell, under the Child Labor in Agriculture rules, the legal age to work on a farm without restrictions would remain 16. Under some conditions youths between ages 12 and 15 would be permitted to do nonhazardous chores outside of school hours. However, those under 18 would be prohibited from working in non-family ag industry jobs, such as grain elevators, stockyards and livestock exchanges.
The regulations would not apply to children working, even with jobs considered hazardous, on their parents’ farm. 4-H members still could raise or care for animals in a non-employment situation and show their animals at county fairs or take them to market. Also, children could help neighbors in need of help, but without pay.
Mainly, an employer-employee relationship would trigger regulations.
I WORKED all through high school on farms, along with a few hours each week as a printer’s devil at the Humboldt Union. I was lucky. Few of my friends found anything as permanent as my newspaper job. Fast food was in its infancy then, and there were few commercial jobs for kids.
My ag jobs mainly were handling hay. Then, the smaller bales, weighing 60 to 100 pounds depending on whether dry prairie or alfalfa, came from a tractor-drawn baler and in most cases tumbled onto a wagon.
My first experience in the hay fields was on the Works farm west of Humboldt. I quickly learned the plum job was bucking bales on a trailer, not dragging and stacking them inside a barn, often under a tin roof made too hot to touch by the blazing summer sun.
For several years Bob Works and I worked in the field with his father, George. After I got a little experience, the three of us traded off driving the tractor every third load.
Meanwhile, George’s brother, Jack, wrangled a crew of kids working the barn. We had the better go — fresh air, usually a breeze that felt oh so good and a big jug of lemonade.
Most days we’d start about 10 in the morning, after dew had dried and the barn crew had unloaded a trailer or two that we’d filled with tightly knit bales the night before, which meant our day often ended after the sunset.
I got $7 a day, which was a pretty good wage when a man working labor then was paid $1 an hour.
My next favorite place to work — the Works gig was top notch — was for Art Solomon, not so much for working conditions but for the noon break.
Art’s wife, Wilma, was a good cook and she demonstrated all her skills — chicken fried in an iron skillet filled with molten lard was a staple — at noontime, followed by a short nap before we marched back to the field.
