Pickin' Tobacco

Pickin’ Tobacco

When I was a very young boy, barely standing as high as a full-grown tobacco plant, my Dad asked me one summer if I was ready to help pick tobacco. My full day’s pay for picking tobacco was to be the great sum of one dollar. Well, in those days, one dollar was a whole lot of money – especially to a young boy like me – so I immediately said “Sure!” – thinking I was making easy money for hardly any work – boy, was I wrong.

The next morning, my Dad woke me up before dawn. We got into his pickup truck and drove over to the tobacco fields. It was August in North Carolina and the cool of the early morning would soon give way to the hot, humid and hazy heat of the day. If you have never seen or touched a tobacco plant, it has a sticky resin all over its leaves and coats your clothes and skin after touching it. At the end of the day, your whole body is coated with the resin, which is very hard to wash off. I would pick the leaves and carry armfuls to a trailer that was pulled over to curing barns by a tractor. The tobacco leaves were tied in groups to long sticks and then hung inside the curing barns, which were like hot ovens – temperatures inside would be almost 130 degrees. You could walk inside for only a few seconds before becoming soaking wet with sweat. And you had to be careful of the snakes – cottonmouths and copperheads – they were everywhere.

At the end of the long, steamy hot day – almost at dusk, my Dad said we were finally done. I was way past done – I immediately fell asleep in the truck on the way home. I didn’t want to take a bath after supper because I was so tired, but I had to because I was filthy. The next morning, we got up again at dawn and did it all over again. This went on for a couple of weeks, until all the tobacco had been picked and hung for curing.

I was finally paid for my two weeks of work – a grand total of $14 – plus an extra $1 as a bonus for getting the job done ahead of schedule. I never had so much money in my life. I couldn't wait to spend some of it, so the first place I went to was the “Toot ‘n Tell It” drive-in in Garner, North Carolina. They had the best “All The Way (mustard, chili, coleslaw, and Frosty Morn weiners)” hot dogs I'd ever eaten – and their ice cream milk shakes were to die for. I put the rest of the money into my piggy bank.

I’ll never forget those tobacco pickin’ days. It was hard work, but I sure loved it.

- Rick Gurkin