_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [88]
The presidential candidate laughed when I explained his family was better than ours. They owned two mules, and my family had to rent one. And Mr. Carter added, “We had two cars on blocks in the front yard.”
There certainly was no disagreement that if you didn’t have a mule in the 1940s, you most likely went without. Anyone who lived on Southern farms in those days knew there was a bond between the farmer and his mule. The one was necessary for the survival of the other. It was important to have a mule that would obey and had a good gait. There was something pleasing about man and mule moving down a cotton row in unison in tune with the commands of “Gee” and “Haw” and “Whoa.” It was simple: If you didn’t have a mule pulling the plow, then you were doing the pulling.
That’s why those of us without a mule were left with one choice: If you wanted cash in your pocket, you got on your knees and picked the cotton from sunup until sundown. And if you were a sissy, forget about it. Especially in a hot August sun with 100-degrees-plus temperatures, crawling on your knees and pulling a heavy sack, moving your bloodied fingers as fast as you could, trying to pick one hundred pounds of cotton every day. Why? Because we were paid one cent per pound picked, and if you wanted to make a dollar, then you had to pick one hundred pounds. The future President said that must have been where the old saying “Another day, another dollar” came from.
Well, as a boy of twelve, I failed again and again, and it was beginning to look like I would never make a dollar, no matter how fast I worked. I was at the point of giving up when two of my black friends, J. W. and George, took pity. They pulled me aside and told me to pack my early-morning dew-drenched cotton very tightly in the bottom of my picking sack, and secondly, when I went to the bushes during the day, to make sure I urinated inside my picking sack to keep the cotton wet and heavy. Water spilled from the drinking jug into the sack helped, too.
I smiled. I had been introduced to the world of science. This explained cotton’s unique smell and color. And what about the cheating? In the broiling sun and with the nightly aches, it was easy to convince yourself it was justified. Daily, I walked from the cotton fields a little less honest, but with a dollar tightly in my fist.
Jimmy Carter was elected President, and we went off to the Georgia coast where the President-elect holed up a few days on Sea Island to unwind. Here he told the media that once while fishing in a cypress hole in a small, one-man bateau, his fishing was interrupted by a swamp rabbit swimming across his bow. Most reporters had never seen a one-man bateau let alone a cypress hole plentiful with good eating bream, and they sure as hell didn’t have anything else to write about. The television and radio folks got out their chuckles and microphones and the newspapers writers grabbed their supply of ridicule. They had a field day.
“President-Elect fends off an attack rabbit with his paddle,” the stories appeared in bold print, and while the ill informed heehawed, we country boys had our own good laugh. Earth’s surface is 71 percent water or thereabout, and in swamps and marshes and other areas with little solid land, swimming and slithering animals and reptiles were nothing new. When meat on your table was hard to come by, we country boys chased swimming wild hogs, rabbits, and even an occasional gator. It was obvious most of my colleagues in the media were strangers to hard times.
The reporters born during or on the latter side of the Great Depression were falling by the wayside, and I was most grateful looks weren’t a requirement for my generation. NBC executives agreed I had the perfect face for radio, and retiring was the farthest thing from my mind.
Jimmy Carter was arguably the most gentlemanly and good-natured President ever, and no one enjoyed a good laugh more. Many times, he bent over grabbing his stomach in