Born Dowagiac MI lived and worked on a family owned dairy farm. Became the throttle man around five years of age on the Farmall Super C while Pa fed corn to the hammer mill. That's a job that entailed plenty of screaming when I failed to bump up the revs fast enough to suit him.Soon as I could reach the pedals at about eight years of age I was assigned to disking, raking, mowing and baling. Aged ten I could drive the bigger tractors and plowing on a limited basis since the furrows were never straight enough for Pa. Pa never let me run the corn picker because he was afraid I'd chop my legs off in the rollers. He was a crazy man with the picker. He was too cheap to replace the wear plates on the rollers so the stalks would get wrapped around them. That would gum up the process. It's easier to pull the stalks off with the machine running. The Old Man would stand between the spinning rollers with the pull back "fingers" zipping by on both sides and yank out the stalks. Sometimes the corn picker would stop in the field for an inordinately long time. My mother would have me walk out to check on him. It was always a great fear for me thinking I'd find him in a big pool of blood, dead.

Born Dowagiac MI lived and worked on a family owned dairy farm. Became the throttle man around five years of age on the Farmall Super C while Pa fed corn to the hammer mill. That's a job that entailed plenty of screaming when I failed to bump up the revs fast enough to suit him.Soon as I could reach the pedals at about eight years of age I was assigned to disking, raking, mowing and baling. Aged ten I could drive the bigger tractors and plowing on a limited basis since the furrows were never straight enough for Pa. Pa never let me run the corn picker because he was afraid I'd chop my legs off in the rollers. He was a crazy man with the picker. He was too cheap to replace the wear plates on the rollers so the stalks would get wrapped around them. That would gum up the process. It's easier to pull the stalks off with the machine running. The Old Man would stand between the spinning rollers with the pull back "fingers" zipping by on both sides and yank out the stalks. Sometimes the corn picker would stop in the field for an inordinately long time. My mother would have me walk out to check on him. It was always a great fear for me thinking I'd find him in a big pool of blood, dead.