My Friend, Willis

Don Remembers

I was six years old when we moved to the farm.  The neighboring farm was owned by Mr. and Mrs. Monroe Crain.  Mr. Crain was the Chester county extension agent, and Mrs. Crain was an elementary school teacher.  They had one son, Willis.  Willis and I became close friends.  That was 60 years ago, and we have remained friends ever since that first encounter.   During our childhood and early adulthood, we shared work, and play, and school. We used to go camping in the woods behind Willis’s house and cook our meals over a campfire.  We built a swimming hole by damming up the creek and swinging across it with a grape vine.  Tackle football was a major game for us – no touch, regular tackle football.  When I got to high school and got pads, I thought I was hell on wheels.

When we were 12 or 13 years old, we went to 4-H Club camp together.  He and I worked all summer to earn the $4.00 to pay to go to camp for a week by working for Mr. Jim Bagley.  He had a farm about ½mile from us.  He had the only hay baler and combine in the community.  We would work with him from daylight to dark for $1.00 a day, going from farm to farm to harvest everybody’s corn and grain.  We would cut the corn with a machete and pile it around a “corn horse” – a wooden structure around which the corn was stacked.  After the corn dried, a shock of it would be loaded up to feed the horses. The hay baler was a wire tied baler which was fed with a fork.  If, in the process of feeding the baler, we broke a pitch fork, we would have to work a whole week to pay for it, receiving no other pay.  When wheat was combined, it had a sacker instead of a bin.  We used 200 pound sacks, and we stacked a big truck full of wheat.  Mr. Bagley’s son, Sam, was very strong.  He could lift the 200 pound  bags of wheat and hoist them on to the wagon or truck as if they were nothing.  It would take two of us to arrange the bags on the truck. We always took the grain to the grain elevator in Shelby, N.C. That was where the closest elevator was located, so we had to leave at 4 A.M. in order to get there.  Sometimes we would have to wait long hours to unload because of the traffic ahead of us.  We also harvested oats for the livestock. Oats were cut with a grain cradle and tied it up in bundles. We loaded it on wagons and stored it in the barn to feed the cows and horses. It was all worth all the work to get to go to Camp Long 4-H Camp. Camp Long was in Aiken S.C., and it was one of the few times when we did nothing but have fun all day.  We had swimming, canoeing, archery, and all kinds of recreational activities.  Every morning we got to go to the canteen to buy snacks.  I had only 25 cents to last the entire week.  The only thing available for a nickel was Luden’s Cough Drops, so that’s what I got every day.

Willis and Richard and I worked together on everything – for Mr. Jim, as well as in our own fields. One year we had an acre of cotton and made a bale of cotton off that acre. Willis’ dad became very ill, Daddy had died, and the three of us did all of the farm work together. Both of our fathers died much too early. The three of us worked well together and made the farms produce a living for us. 

We sold our cows before my senior year in high school so that I might play football.  Willis and Richard started to Clemson, and I finished my senior year in high school.  The following summer Willis and I started working for Borden Milk Company in Chester during our summer breaks.  Those summers were hard work but we earned 90 cents an hour!

 Willis, Richard, and I stayed good friends, continuing to work together on the farms until we left to go to Clemson. None of us did very much farm work in Chester after leaving to go to school. Mama went to Winthrop to work as a house manager and sold our farm.  Willis still lives in the house where his parents lived.  We still keep in touch with each other. Every time I see him or call him, he’ll say, “Hello, my friend”.