Originally Posted by martha jo
My uncle had quite a few cotton fields and it was in the days of pulling a bag and picking...I got $1.30 for the effort and never asked to go again. Later I befriended an elderly woman who said the cotton picker ruined their good life.
I would love to meet such a person with that experience. It is interesting that she thought the "cotton gin" ruined their "good life". She could have meant there was even LESS money without the opportunity to work locally, or maybe her family spent all their time together & some were forced to move away as a result of no work. I imagine it was both.
If only our kids had such opportunities to learn some of those kinds of life lessons as you did; it teaches appreciation of others effort & respect for manual labor. I did quite a lot of physical labor as a kid, mainly by spending summers with my elderly grandparents who were very hard workers into their 90's. My thoughts as a kid were...if they could do it, I could do it...and I did. I saw it as both respect to them and as a challenge to myself to keep up with them.