Mark Sullivan remembers summers working on tobacco farms in Connecticut during the late 1950s, and the lessons learned from doing this backbreaking work.
Originally aired July 11, 2008, on NPR’s Morning Edition.
Transcript
Mark Sullivan (MS)
MS: The town I grew up in, everybody had a stretch from fourteen to whenever, you know, you worked on tobacco. It was where all your friends were in the summer. If you weren’t working on tobacco, you’d had nothing to do, really. You know, you finished school and you went to work on the farm.
The boys would get the dirty work and the girls would get the clean work. The boys’ work was called suckering. And that was crawling on your hands and knees down the roads and pulling the suckers off. And the other thing I always remember was if we got a little lazy, the superintendent Bill Miller — God bless him — would stand out with his hands on his hips. And he says, ”Alright you kids.” He says, ”All I want to see is asses and elbows going up those rows.” You know, it was a filthy job because tobacco has tar in it. So you get it all over your hands. And by the end of the day your hands would be black. I can remember coming home and my mother making me get undressed on the back porch because you’d be filthy dirty.
But you know, you kinda grew up and you learned how to work. And I think for a lot of kids it was, you know, this is not something I want to do my whole life. I mean, I’m not denigrating anybody who made a life out of it. I can remember working with some women, hoeing tobacco, who were in their seventies and had done it their whole life. And they didn’t wear pants. They always wore a dress. And they would dress relatively nicely to come work in a tobacco field. And they would go like lightning and they never got tired. And we were kids and we wore gloves because we’d get blisters on our hands. And they’d just look at you like, what kind of sissy wears gloves? You know.
One of the field bosses was an older gentleman with a very heavy Polish accent. I can remember his name, Stanley Dunbeck. Hardworking man, good man. He always called us the goddamn college boys. And he said to us one day, ”You goddamn college boys. You lucky. You smart. You get an education. I never had that chance.” That always stuck with — still does. I’m sixty-one years old and I can see him saying it now.
And, you know, I look back on it now, and I’ve said to my wife so many times, ”God, I wish I could get the kids one summer on tobacco.” You know, I — I probably learned a lot more there than you learn in high school.