Making Hay

Making Hay

In 1993, Dr. Jernigan wrote about "making hay" in a Kernel Book of the same
name. One of the major concerns of the blind (as is true for the rest of the population of
America) is how to earn a little money. In doing this, Dr. Jernigan taught himself an
important lesson-one that would stand him, and the blind students he taught, in good stead
for decades thereafter. Here it is:

MAKING HAY
by Kenneth Jernigan
As a blind child growing up on a farm in the hills of Middle Tennessee
in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, I did a lot of thinking. This is not
surprising since there wasn’t much else to do. We lived in a four-room house on a
gravel road, and I doubt that an automobile a week passed our door. We had no radio, no
telephone, no newspaper, no magazines, and no books except the Bible and the textbooks my
brother (four years older than I) brought home from school.
The world of the late ‘20’s and early ‘30’s in
rural Tennessee was a totally different place from what we know today. Nobody thought
about atom bombs, pollution, or jet planes. About the hottest topic I heard discussed by
my elders was whether it was a sin for a woman to bob her hair and what the likelihood was
that you would go to hell if you played cards. I had better explain that last remark. I am
not referring to playing cards for money, just ordinary games around the family table. And
while we are on the subject, there was no question at all about whether you would go to
hell if you danced or played pool. You would.
The difference between the world of then and there and the one of here
and now was not limited to the rural areas. Let me give you an example. When I went off to
the Tennessee School for the Blind in Nashville at the age of six (that would have been
January of 1933), one of the more charming customs of the place was a Saturday morning
ritual involving the Scriptures. Shortly after breakfast the small boys (I don’t know
what happened to the girls since there was strict segregation) were plopped down on a
bench and given the task of memorizing a chapter from the Bible. It didn’t do any
good to protest, object, or try to resist. You sat there until you memorized it, after
which you were free to go play.
One’s religion had nothing to do with it, nor did one’s
interest or aptitude. When you got the task done, you could (within limits) go where you
pleased and do what you liked. Meanwhile you couldn’t. And whatever time you spent
trying to beat the system was just that much of the morning gone. I suppose I need not
tell you that I quickly concluded to learn my chapter with minimum delay, which I
religiously (no play on words intended) did. As a result, I have been a devout Bible
quoter ever since-and much, I might add, to my benefit and long-range satisfaction. Ah,
well, children are not always in the best position to know what will stand them in good
stead.
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that everything in
that Tennessee world of the ‘20’s and ‘30’s concerned the Bible or
religious matters. It didn’t. We popped corn in a pan of bacon grease on the wood
stove in the kitchen or in a long-handled popper at the fireplace in one or the other of
the two bedrooms. (The house had a kitchen, a dining room, and two bedrooms.) We visited
our neighbors and relatives, either walking or (if the distance was too far) riding in a
wagon drawn by two mules; we gathered hickory nuts and walnuts; and now and again the
family sang songs or listened to a neighbor play a banjo. At Christmas time there was a
great deal of cooking, but no convenience foods, of course, and as little as possible
bought from the store. For instance, we didn’t make fruitcake. That would have cost
too much. Instead, we made jam cake. The black walnuts, the homemade blackberry jam, and
most of the other ingredients came from our farm and required no outlay of cash.
As to my personal situation, it was (if you want to be high-toned about
it) what you might call anomalous. Nobody in the neighborhood had ever known a blind
person, so there was no one to give advice. My parents loved me, but they didn’t know
what to do. This led to some strange inconsistencies. For instance, my mother and dad
didn’t want me to carry wood for the fireplace or stove or water from the spring,
which was only a few feet from the house. They didn’t want me to play in the yard or
go any farther than the porch. They were afraid I might get hurt. Yet, they had no
objection at all to my shooting firecrackers at Christmas time.
It was regarded as a natural thing for boys in that part of the country
to shoot firecrackers, and I suppose my parents just never thought about it. One of my
earliest memories is of me standing on the front porch with a match and a firecracker in
my hand and of my father, saying as he went past me into the house, "You’d
better be careful, or you’ll blow your hand off with that thing." Young as I
was, I knew that he was right and that nobody would stop me if I was careless-so I
wasn’t careless. I developed a technique of holding the match just below the head and
pressing the firecracker fuse against it. Match and fuse were held between my thumb and
index finger, so there was no possibility of the firecracker’s exploding in my hand
since my fingers were between it and the flame. Never once did I get hurt, and I think the
experience helped me learn something about risk taking and proper caution.
As I have already said, I did a lot of thinking as I was growing up. I
also did a lot of planning, for I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in close
confinement in that four-room house on the farm. As I reasoned it, I needed to read all
the books I could, and I needed to go to college. Therefore, as Braille and recorded books
became available to me through the books for the blind program of the Library of Congress,
I followed through on the matter and crammed my head as full of book learning as I could.
Later I went to college and put the limited environment of the farm behind me.
Meanwhile, I wanted to do productive work and make some money. This
wasn’t easy since my family (though loving me) thought I was virtually helpless. My
first effort (caning chairs at the School for the Blind) brought more labor than cash, but
I had to start where I could. Also, we had cows on the farm, and we sold their milk to a
nearby cheese factory. During summer vacations I milked cows night and morning and got ten
cents a week for it. At the time I was probably eleven or twelve.
During the first part of the Second World War (I would have been
fourteen or fifteen), I made a little money collecting peach seeds. I sold them to a man
who came by twice a week in a truck. I was told that the kernels were used for filters in
gas masks, but I don’t know whether that was true or not. What I do know is that I
got a penny a pound for them and that there were a tremendous number of peaches eaten in
the neighborhood.
Then, there was the NYA (the National Youth Administration), one of
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. Beginning in 1943 I washed windows, scrubbed
floors, shined the small boys’ shoes, and did other chores at the School for the
Blind for three dollars a month-fifteen hours at twenty cents an hour. I thought I was
rich.
And there was even an extra dividend. I was not the only boy at the
School for the Blind who got three dollars a month for working for the NYA. There were
quite a number, which meant that we now had a cash economy, with more money in circulation
than the boys at the School for the Blind had ever known. It stimulated business. I was
one of those who profited. I established a relationship with a local wholesale house and
walked there once or twice a week to carry large boxes of candy and chewing gum back to
the School. I bought the candy for three cents a bar and sold it for a nickel. Going for
the candy was not only good exercise but also good profit. My roommate and I did a
thriving business. It helped me get some of the money to start to college.
There was also my broom-making project. A neighbor in the country
raised broom corn, and I took it with me to the School for the Blind and made it into
brooms. (All blind boys in those days were taught chair caning and broom making regardless
of their aptitudes or wishes, and I think I could still do a creditable job at either
task.) My neighbor supplied the broom corn, and I made and sold the brooms. We split the
profits.
During the latter part of the Second World War (by this time I was
sixteen or seventeen) I got a chance during the school year to make some money by sorting
aircraft rivets. The Vultee Aircraft Company established a plant near Nashville to make
dive bombers, and there were many thousands of rivets in each plane. The workers would
drop rivets on the floor; and when the dirt, cigarette stubs, and other leavings were
swept up, the assorted mixture was brought to the students at the School for the Blind for
sorting. We separated the rivets from the trash, sorted them into sizes and types,
discarded any with rough spots on them, and sent them back to the aircraft plant. It was a
messy job, but it was a way to make some money. I think I got two and a half cents a pound
for it.
But all of these various jobs were preliminary to my first truly big
opportunity. It happened like this: In the summer of 1944 (I was seventeen) I wanted to
expand my horizons. Farm laborers in our neighborhood made $1.25 per day, working from
sunrise to sunset, and I wanted to join their ranks. The pivotal event occurred when they
began making hay. We had no power machinery. There was a mule-drawn mower, and after the
hay was cut, there was a mule-drawn rake. The men would follow the rake with pitchforks,
putting the hay into shocks and then tossing it into the mule-drawn wagon. Then it would
be taken to the barn and put into the loft.
I tried to get my dad and the other decision makers to let me try my
hand at making hay. They were not only unwilling but didn’t even want to talk about
it. In fact when I insisted, they indicated to me that they were busy and had work to do
and that I should stop bothering them.
Since I was unwilling to spend the summer doing nothing, I looked
around for other opportunities. It occurred to me that I might try my hand at making
furniture. Lumber was cheap in those days, and I also had the idea of using spools. At
that time thread was wound on wooden spools, plastic not yet having come into use, and
almost everybody sewed. Spools were throw-aways, and I got all my relatives, plus
department stores in surrounding towns, to save them for me. I got them in every
conceivable size and then sorted them and strung them on iron rods to make table legs.
The design was simple, but the product was both durable and graceful. I
could make a table in a day and could sell it for $10. It cost me $1.75 in materials, so I
had a profit of $8.25. My rejection became a triumph. While the men did back-breaking
labor in the hay fields for $1.25 a day, I stayed in my workshop, listened to recorded
books, and produced tables for a profit of $8.25. No matter how fast I made them, I could
never keep up with demand. It was as regular as clock work-$8.25 net profit day after day,
not the $1.25 I would have made in the hay field.
I also designed and made floor lamps from spools. The lamp had an old
steering wheel for a base with a pipe running up the center, surrounded by four columns of
spools, with a fixture and shade on top. I could make it in a day, and I sold it for $25,
with a cost for materials of a little over $8. This was twice as much profit as I made
from a table. The trouble was that the lamps were harder to sell, so I got relatively few
orders.
By the end of the summer I had more money than I had ever seen, and I
did it again the following year. I went to college in 1945 and never returned to the
furniture business, but it taught me a valuable lesson, as did the other jobs I have
described. There are many ways to make hay, and if you lose $1.25, you may make $8.25 if
you put your mind to it. As I have already said, the world of fifty years ago was a
different place from the world of today-but many of the lessons still hold. They probably
always will, and one of them is that making hay is a lifelong process.

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