Woodie, An Introduction

It has been two years since my old neighbor died.  He was one of those rare characters you meet who makes life interesting.  I first met him when I was 16, and he wanted me to help out baling hay.  When I got over there, there were several guys I went to high school with also there to help.  Woodie happened to have a wire baler, and wanted all of the help to use hay hooks to handle the bales.  This was a skill which took me a while to learn.  Not only was I flinging the hook, missing the bale and hitting my leg, but I was nearly throwing out my back trying to lug the 60 or so pound bales.  I wasn't worth a cup of spit that day as baling help, as I needed to grow some more to be very worthwhile.  I also wasn't up for one of the major perks of baling for Woodie, which was the free beer provided during the day.  Mom would have seriously frowned on me drinking at that time, so I passed.  But after we finished each load, or sometimes if a bale broke and we had to feed the broken bale back through the baler, Woodie would get off of the tractor, offer us a drink of water or a can of beer, and start telling us a story about the olden days.  The guys I worked with hated the stories, because they just drug out the work day.  They had things to do after we got done, and wanted to get out of there.  I, on the other hand, didn't.  I found the stories to be fascinating, and the break from the labor helped me catch my breath.  Over the next 15 years or so, I heard a very large number of stories, some of them a number of times, while drinking Goebel (Joe-Bell, the fine French lager) beer from the 1942 refrigerator out in the barn, which he and his wife had gotten when they got married.  In the future, I'll try to relate some of the stories and the things I learned about farming when farming was honest-to-God work.