This is the sixth of the monthly columns my late dad wrote: By this time, the column was renamed "Behind the Chicken Shack" and sported a graphic logo, which is not shown in this entry.
Old Rusty lives way back in the boonies with a couple of hound dogs and one lazy ole mule. With nothing to do all day except whittle and listen to the radio, he gets some off-the-wall ideas about our political structure and its impact on our daily lives. Maybe you will get a chuckle out of some of the stuff he has come up with, and who knows, you may even agree with parts of it.January, 1999 Updated regularly -- Totally new first of every month.
t'other day and I got to thinking. I am blamed sure lucky to live out cheer among the rattlesnakes and coyotes, away from the hate and killing and cheating in the cities. Of all these things, racism is the most savage. It is tearing our nation apart. Pity folks are so blamed wrapped up in their own-selves they forget to be compassionate towards other human beings.
I remember when I was a lad and I went into the bus station with my Dad. The first thing I spied was a drinking fountain with a large, hand painted sigh that read: "White Only." I asked Dad what that meant and he ‘splained that there are a heap of ignorant people who think what color a man is a measure of what is in his heart. "T'aint so a'tall", Pa reckoned. He never spoke much good English, but he had a site of good old common horse sense.
In the summertime we bailed hay for the public. Not many folks had greenback dollars to pay so they gave us part of the hay, which we hauled home and stored in the barn loft against hard times. Those came regular ever winter and folks from town would come out and buy the hay for twenty-five cents a bale, to feed their milk cow. In them days we didn't have pasturized and homogonized milk, but it was blame sure fresh.
One of my jobs after I got old ‘nuff, maybe ten or ‘leven, was to take a team of horses to some far off field and mow hay. I'll tell ya, a boy has plenty of time for thinkin' out there all alone. One day while I wuz nearly hypnotized from watching the tall oats, mixed liberally with Johnson grass, fall back in splendid green waves when the sickle sliced it off an inch or two above the earth, I got to thinking about something that had happened that morning. None of the hay hands had any conveyance so Papa ‘n me gathered ‘em up in our old homemade pickup truck. We stopped for a new guy that morning and he looked in back, nodded at Zeke and said, "What's he doing here?"
"Gonna work like the rest of us," Pa said casting over his shoulder.
"I ain't working with no damn N
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