(Ed.'s Note: If you are in your 60s or 70s and grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, you probably saw people picking cotton by hand before the advent of the cotton-picking machines. If you were poor, you probably picked it yourself. Kids like the ones in the photo above carried their little sacks while the men would often have two large sacks sown to be able to stay picking in the fields and come back on two rows to fill them at the weigh in.
For some reason or other, the scales had Roman numerals instead of numbers and kids would learn the numerals when they brought their filled sacks to weigh in. Cotton was poorly paid, but school kids would earn anywhere between $10 to $15 a week which their parents often used to purchase shoes or clothes for school. For some, these were the "good old days," while to others, these days were best forgotten or remembered by the callused hands and aching back.)
8 comments:
Before this type of scale, we had the balanced and pilon, I grew up in this environment, this was a way of life, not by choice, but life itself. Our Dad was a share cropper, Starr Co., dry land. This why at HS graduation, I volunteered for the draft, served, veteran at 20,two years 10 mos. and two weeks I earned a BA, four years later, MS, through the GI Bill.
Yes," good old life", but honorable, made me what I am today, all our 3 children have degrees too.
What about the portables at some of our BISD high schools such as Porter and Pace? Why doesn't BISD budget to create new buildings on the land that these portables, often in poor condition, are located on? Do college students take classes in portables? Why does BISD promote itself as an Early College High School district yet fail to provide classrooms that are equal in design to all the other classrooms on the campus? Students deserve better, and taxpayer money is being unequally allocated to sports options like astroturf rather than academic necessities like adequate and equal classroom space.
Now the kids gets calluses on their hands from holding on to
the steering wheels of the Mercedes Benz or their what-ever-kind
of lastest phone. None know how to do a days work and earn money
like we used to in order to buy school supplies and clothes and
sometimes one meal in the cafeteria at home. But what is so sad
is that some who had this type of childhood have forgotten where
they came from and lift their noses as they look down on some of
us. I stand with pride with my BISD education, my TSC and PAC
degrees and would never change a thing in my life.
Being a gringo boy my brother and I picked cotton during the summer it was the only $$ we had gringos were poor too
This is how we weighed the backpacks filled with mota that we brought across the river to get paid.
Yes I do remember picking Cotton! And yes those were the good old days! My favorite thing was the field Hollers!
Dude, you are bringing back some good memories.....gasoline was 25 cents per gallon, there was no such thing as needing car insurance, picked cotton all day listening to conjunto music on a transistor radio, went home to shower and then played pony league baseball.
Back then I could function on 5 hrs of sleep every night. Now, I have to drink ENSURE Chocolate milk and pop some Viagara.
Cotton Fields by CCR
For those of us who are now in our sixties and seventies life was this way all over the nation. Growing up on the East Coast there were tobacco fields, vegetable fields, peanut fields where we worked each year. School was often delayed until the crops were in...but our parents insisted that we stay in school and that we work for our "spending money" or necessities for school. Our parents were the "Greatest Generation", surviving the Great Depression and World War II. I am proud of my military service and combat service in Vietnam. Like to person above, I earned two degrees while in the military and our children all have advanced degrees and now have families of their own. My parents instilled in us a proud work ethic and the value of education. It all started by working in fields like the cotton field shown in the picture.
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