Spring happenings in 1967

I remember when we as a family,except mom and dad, would turn used potato sacks inside out so they could be used by the farmers to haul seed potatoes to his farm to plant. This was the dirtiest job I can remember as we had this big fan that sucked the bag from the bottom up through this tube and when it was thus pulled inside out we would pull it out and lay the sack on a pallet where it could be easily picked up by the women who were filling sacks with cut seed potatoes ready to be planted. Oh don't et a sack go or it would be torn to pieces by the fan.

Now the reason this was such a dirty job is that while this fan or vacuum would pull the sack inside out it would also pull all the dirt and ugly things from and toss them very high in the air for it to settle where, you guessed it all over our hair, our clothes, in our eyes, our mouth. In other words we would spend half an hour turning sacks or bags and then we would spend three hours tring to clean up by taking our outer clothes off in the back, running in to take a shower, get dressed, clean the tub as it would have a film all over, brush our teeth and mouth, get dressed, come out to vacuum the floor and where we had run and then washing our clothes. Are you tired yet? Of course, we wold turn sacks for more than ¼th hour, but before we would be about working 3 hours we would have turned enough for three days production of seed potatoes. While we could barely keep up if doing it by hand.

This was much faster than doing the turning by hand. Why did they need to be turned inside out. Well, it seems that certain companies would not allow there sacks to be used for other than the original product, and could not be read appropriately while inside out. This is how the whole potato season started.

While, we were turning sacks and cutting seed potatoes, my father and crew were preparing the plant inside ready for the grown potatoes. This took much longer than doing what I had previously talked about earlier. Anyway, I had just purchased a purple ’55 Chevy and with black tuck and roll upholstery and dad always hired some mentally handicapped help. Well this was the year when he had a guy by the name of Earl and he was helping the painter, Newell Anderson loved a hideous tint of green and everything had to be painted that color. Earl was carrying a pail of this color paint when he passed my brother Anthony and just thought it would be fun to pour the paint over Anthony’s head. After doing this he went off to get another pail of paint. Well Anthony came to me and asked for a ride home to get cleaned up, to which I said no!!!! I didn’t want to get my car all colored with green paint, can you imagine a purple car with black and pale green interior? So a friend gave Anthony a ride home on his scooter, with the wind dring and hardening the paint with every second to where mom and friends had to cut all Anthony’s hair off and then slowly remove the paint with some sort of harsh chemical. Boy, was I in trouble when I got home, youd have thought I had shot the poor kid. My only line of defense was that I didn’t want any Anderson green in my car to which I was told that mom was going to paint the whole car in that color. It never happened though.