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She worked on the tobacco fields many years ago; and never quite figured out why the "accident" occurred. Now, after many year later, she gets an "inkling" of the real reasons why.
SPOOL HOLLOW RE-REVISITED
by
Ann Marie Hannon
They are all probably dead now. So, it doesn’t matter what I write. I guess it doesn’t matter either whether it was even real or imagined. All I know is that as far as I’m concerned, there is something in the unreal that makes us all worry that it actually could happen, and if it did and it could make us suffer, then there’s a need to continue staying alert and to never forget.
Back then, when it happened, there was a popcorn sky on the horizon, and it was the kind of day that you don’t ever want to forget; although when it ended, you might wish that it never, ever began.
So, let me start with that popcorn sky many years ago, that oversaw a strange turn of events on the “Day of the Great Moon” during the summer of 1960.
We were just kids that summer; looking to make a few bucks to help with paying for the Prom, and there had been much more rain than normal, so tobacco plants on the farms in our County were growing like gangbusters under the shaded gauzy tobacco tent tarp.
We, young teen age girls, were the “tobacco girls” which is what we were called by the snobby kids in our school, and we had been doing overtime on the farm every weekend for the entire months of June and July.
My Mom and Dad didn’t mind the issue of my working overtime either since it meant “tobacco” money would keep them from feeling guilty for not being able to buy clothes for me including the Prom dress I wanted so much.
While that was a big “plus” for them, in terms of money, the minus for me was we all needed the rain to stop since it was also affecting Dad’s summer business of selling fried clams from a food truck near the local State Park.
Yes, our days at the tobacco fields were busy that year, and I hardly understood all that was going on except the West Indian men who worked on the farm had a view about it that always made me laugh.
They were known as the “bundle boys,” and their job was to bring huge and heavy bundles of lathes to the sewing tables where we girls would string pads of tobacco leaves on to the three-foot-long lathes using tobacco “sewing machines.”
The West Indian “bundle boys” knew there was work in the fields that was much dirtier and harder to do then the work they did when they stayed in the tobacco “sheds” or barns to as they liked to say, “protect” the girls from the teen boys who worked in the fields outside.
But, the process we used in the sheds always made me wonder why girls as young as twelve years old would be allowed to use the machines. Then again, who could figure out the thinking that went on back in those days. Oh yeah, immigrant labor and technically child labor were all in a flourish for the tobacco farmers in our State back then.
The “employees” would grow, then dry and hone the regal cigar wrappers for Cuban cigars. It’s amazing how time flies or doesn’t when you think about present-day events and how closely they seem to match.
But let me get back to those days, since in many ways my life now would have never been what it is now, without being poor, back then.
Also, with getting back to the popcorn sky, it was a truly a magnificent day that day in June and only two weeks after the school had shut down for summer vacation.
All the rich kids had started planning for their trips to camp or the shore, but not the “tobacco girls”. Instead we waited right by the Town Hall about a mile from everyone’s home, and after we met the bus, we were delivered to the “fields” by 6:45 a.m.
It was normally at least a 40-minute ride, and after disembarking, we all stood by our supervisor and started taping our fingers to avoid the blisters and cuts that tying the growing tobacco plants caused due to the coarse string we used to break the ends of the slip knots that were tied to the plants with our hands.
Actually, it didn’t take much to learn that “skill”, and in one sense you could say it was really a type of vacation too; away from snooty teachers and incredible homework.
We still had to make our lunch every evening, and bring it with us each day, and the supervisor for the had salt tablets for anyone who might wind up dehydrated from the sweltering, almost always ninety-degree heat under the vacuous gauzy white canopy tents that boasted rows upon rows of shade-grown tobacco each year.
“Hey, do you think you’ll all be able to make piecework today?” shouted the supervisor, who always liked to nag and knew there wasn’t any reason for doing it.
“Yep, gotta make piecework, or don’t make any money,” I quipped back.
The sun shone through the patches of clouds that puffed and moved in almost effervescent synchronization. It was hotter under the tents than outside the tents, where at least a quick breeze, or a gulp of water from the wells along the way might lessen the temperature.
“Hey, slow down, you’re way ahead of everyone else tying those plants row after row without stopping for water. You don’t want to get overheated, do you?” yelled my friend Katie Collins.
“Oh, don’t play games with me, Katie,” I called back. “You just want to slow me, so you can get the best rows to tie.”
“Not true, I’m looking out for you. Would be so boring during lunch if we couldn’t sit and share sandwiches and just talk girl talk.” Katie laughed and ran down toward the next row that wasn’t occupied. Only, before she got there the noon whistle was blowing, to allow a whole half hour for us to eat lunch and rest up before the next four hours that always seemed the longest.
“I have a question,” whispered Katie as she sat cross-legged on the grassy hillside under one of the few trees located in the fields.
“Yeah, what,” I responded, chewing on a PB&J sandwich with marshmallow fluff, and opening my thermos of lemonade. It tasted cool and sweet, and I never worried about gaining weight, so it didn’t matter how many calories it was.
“Well, I just wanted to know if you’d heard anything about the big boss wanting you to be the local girls’ supervisor here, now that you’ve been working here for 3 summers and will be graduating soon."
"The reason I’m asking is because I also I heard that some other bosses don’t want you ’cause you’re too good and you might make everyone worried if they don’t make piecework and could get fired.”
I finished my lemonade, then very slowly moved closer to Katie so no one else would hear. There was a soft breeze, but my face had turned beet red.
“Look,” I started with a voice lowered to an effectively strong whisper, “I’m good because I push myself. I don’t ask for help and I’m not going to kiss anyone’s ass just to be any local girls’ supervisor, having to keep their attendance, getting them to keep quiet on the bus, and making sure they pay attention to their job each day; and I absolutely don’t want to ever have to fire anyone.”
I stood up, gathering my lunch bag.
“Sheesh,” Katie murmured, “so the answer to my question’s just plain no.
“Well, the answer is I haven’t heard, and I don’t want to hear either.”
Katie smiled and quickly moved on to another topic, something about wishing the boys were closer during lunchtime so at least we could talk to them.
I agreed. There was just too much discipline all the time, and everyone in charge was white and male, and most smoked or chewed tobacco, which I found disgusting.
“Okay, let’s get to the outhouse so we don’t have to waste time doing it this afternoon. I really need to make piecework this week. Are you okay that I don’t want to be a supervisor?”
“Sure, sure. I get it.” Katie stood up, threw her lunch bag into the trash barrel nearby, and got ready for the rest of the day, never noticing the popcorn sky had become overcast and dull.
Of course, by now, you must know that I never got to be supervisor, but the reason why is sort of scary. Katie’s revelation had occurred in June during the time we were all in the fields tying the plants, so they would continue to grow as tall as the height of the tents and not get crushed by any serious rainstorms or hail later in the season.
What happened though was later in mid-July when the tobacco plant leaves were ready for the first picking. The local boys and the boys who arrived from out of state and stayed at a camp all summer would do that; and the local girls and the girls who arrived and stayed at camps like the out-of-state boys would sew the leaves on to yardstick-long lathes that were then hung in the tobacco barn rafters starting about a hundred feet at the rooftop of the barn, then gradually moving downward to fill the entire barn before everyone would move on to the next barn also called a tobacco shed to follow the same process over and over and over again.
It was arduous, dirty, and occasionally one of the boys would stick a tobacco worm (all slimy-looking and larger than even a caterpillar worm) in among the leaf pads, and that would cause all sorts of angst among some of the girls too. It was dull and tedious work, but at least in the barns, the sewing was done on machines that looked like sawhorses that were placed on waist-high tabletops in long rows along each side of the barn.
The girls would have pads of leaves face down on the tables and then quickly grab one in each hand, match the stems so they would meet, and then snap the pair of leaves into one of the thirty-six or so clips along the top of the machine.
Once all the leaves were snapped on all the clips, the worker girl would take a piece of string from a large ball of twine at the side of the machine and hook the string on to a so-called “needle” that when she pressed a button would send the needle right through all the leaf stems from one side of the machine to the other.
After that it would take a quick clipping of the string and a reaching for a lathe that would be on the flattened top of the machine. She would need to quickly fasten one end of the string through a small slit at the end of the lathe and next do the same at the other end. Once the lathe was tied, she would release the clips using a handle on the side of the machine and lift the lathe gingerly from the machine to a section behind her where the lathe could be placed, waiting for a worker to pick it up along with loads of other tied lathes to bring to the workers who hung the lathes in the rafters.
If there was anything good to say about this, at least for the girls working there, it was easier to make piecework sewing in the barns, and at least being out of the heat of the sun.
That July, I was coming back to that barn from the outhouse at around 3:20, almost at the end of the day, and when I got to that tobacco barn I slowed down. Dan the straw boss stopped me to talk. He always had a way of making sure my piecework efforts were slowed down, and it was annoying.
The last tractor had just finished being unpacked after delivering the last load of tobacco leaf baskets. Normally each flatbed trailer being pulled by a tractor had at least fifty or sixty tobacco baskets filled with pads of leaves that had to be quickly unloaded and pulled into the barn, so the girls could continue sewing as uninterruptedly as possible and not be slowed down. It was a real production operation, that’s for sure.
Dan asked me a few silly questions that I answered quickly. Then I turned to go into the barn and finish the day. The wide entrance to the barn suddenly became a complete blur, and I soared about fifteen feet into the air, unconscious.
What had happened is the tractor driver delivering the leaf baskets to the barn had gone to pull away quickly, except he had turned the steering wheel too far to the right, causing the rear of the flatbed to knock me straight into the air.
After I gained consciousness I learned my right arm was broken in two places; I think that qualified for a compound fracture. The only good news, as luck would have it, is I’m left-handed. That’s because I needed to write down everything that had happened for insurance purposes.
There were no computers in those days, we didn’t own a typewriter, and I was only going to start typing classes in high school that coming September.
Yes, you guessed it.
My “tobacco days” were completely ended for sure. The popcorn sky that had endeared my hopes and dreams had popped me right out of the piecework money.
But something did happen that was closer to the concept that every cloud has a silver lining, even if it’s not in a popcorn sky. I started writing editorials for our local newspaper about the dangers of the tobacco fields for kids. I got noticed, and by the time I turned sixteen, the newspaper offered and gave me a small job setting type for the daily news print.
In the meantime, I’ll never know for sure whether the “accident” in the fields was planned or not.
It doesn’t matter though; I’m still here and found out some events that occurred much later and seemed to vindicate everything further too, particularly if I had become a supervisor and later been able to move up the corporate ladder to handle work in the warehouses during the Fall and Winter months.
Turns out I spoke with a friend whom I hadn’t seen in more years than I wanted to remember. He had worked on the tobacco fields about the same time I worked there and had remained living close to my roots for all that time.
We reunited when I returned for a high school reunion celebration in 2002 and had a lot to catch up on, including how many old friends were there and how many reminiscences we could recall, as well as those sad but true experiences we all had when 9/11 happened.
At dinner during that reunion, I found myself sitting next to Larry, a classmate and friend from long ago in high school and who had worked on the tobacco fields during the summers that I had worked there.
We got very chatty over wine with our surf-and-turf meal, and Larry also told me a lot had happened in tobacco over the years, including a disastrous blue mold that had apparently entered the region from Cuba. The blue mold attacked tobacco plants with a vengeance almost unbelievable, until you stood by the fields and saw the bulldozers plowing the acres that were infected with the fungus.
He explained that an entire field could be destroyed by the fungus overnight, and the first outbreak had occurred around 1978, after I had been long gone from my birth home.
Most of my family was dispersed geographically by that time too and very busy. I was very busy with my writing career and other sweet and amazing events, including motherhood.
Whenever I did visit my family, those who were still living there in the late ’70s and early ’80s, we had way too much going on to even think about tobacco. But Larry refreshed my interest as he also refreshed my wineglass and explained how decimated the fields had become during that time; all due to the blue mold. He added the “good news,” for what it was worth and I guess only for cigar lovers, was the region experienced a so-called freedom from the mold for the next nineteen years, until 1996 and l997, when it was back again, and that time the effect was also devastating until 1999, when the harvest was better, apparently due to a torrid summer that the region experienced that year, keeping the fungus spores to a minimum and inhibiting their growth.
Larry had never smoked cigars or cigarettes himself and laughingly told me he lived in a house that was built by a company that also built tobacco barns, where the tobacco leaves were hung to dry in late summer and fall, and the tobacco warehouses, where the leaves were cut away from their stems by adult workers during late fall, winter, and early spring.
“Yep,” chortled Larry, “those barns were the most amazingly constructed edifices I’ve ever seen. Sturdy, wide, and unlike the fields with their puny poles and wires. Those barns and sheds were built to withstand any tornado, hurricane, and even a strong thunder and lightning storm too.
“The warehouses were also grand,” he added, “in the sense they often had brick construction and wood paneling throughout.”
I was glad Larry had a sort of reference for some part of the fields, as they were called by those who had worked there. It prompted me to continue checking up on the old haunts from time to time just out of curiosity and nothing more.
So, in 2014 just by chance, I ran across a news story that had started around 2012, and was rather surprised. I learned that an LLC group had developed plans to convert a former cigar warehouse into over forty apartment units. The plans called for extensive remodeling, removing the “cigar corporation” sign on the outside walls, and making it work as an apartment building in the residential area where it was located.
According to the interview with the developer, the interior of the building was what Larry had described too. It had extensive wood paneling and an historical significance which influenced the rationale for the effort to make it a renewal project. Since the developer had already converted another similar building in a nearby town, it appeared from the article that this town Zoning Commission would approve it, and town council members would vote to accept it.
As I continued to stay updated over the next year, it seems that as the saying goes, all hell broke loose. Turns out the project did receive an approval by the zoning folks, but the town council started receiving all sorts of hate mail before the upcoming hearing on accepting the Zoning Commission’s approval. The list of witnesses who wanted to provide testimony before the town council was already in the hundreds.
What I later found strange was that after the town council meeting was reported in the archival news articles and newspapers I researched, there was absolutely no other information. The archives were completely devoid of anything about what eventually happened subsequent to that town council event. I did learn neighbors didn’t want the building converted since it could affect the ambiance and density of the neighborhood, but no references to any final town council decision.
I also learned rumors had spread that the entire approval and acceptance process had been referred to by the developer as a “done deal” and supposedly “fixed” for sure. But with all my research, I was unable to find any news about whether that had occurred. Of course, not being able to find out only made me more and more curious about what had happened, and since I no longer lived anywhere near my original home of state, and my only resource was the Internet, and so, I chucked the archival search and instead I turned to Google!
I used the address of the old tobacco warehouse building, hoping to find a news article that I may have somehow missed. As the other saying goes, lo and behold, the results were shocking! Would you believe I found, not an article about the warehouse, but an actual real estate listing for the sale of the warehouse!
That 43,000-square-foot building is currently on the market and listed for over 1,450,000 dollars on 1.1 acres of land. Sadly, there is also an end song. The listing remarks about the warehouse showed approval for apartments. Wow! It seems either the developer abandoned the project and sold it to someone trying to resell it, or the developer is now owner but doesn’t want to do the actual apartment development.
Bottom line, for me though, is that I found my answer, and sometime between 2014 and 2018, the development concept approved by zoning had been accepted by the town council with one surprising development (no pun intended). The number of apartments approved and substantially less than the original forty, shows about twenty.
Of course, it all makes me wonder what happened, and why there were no news articles about the progress for that weathered, antique structure. Not sure I want to follow it anymore either, and that’s why I sort of wish today’s popcorn sky had never begun.
What I can say though and what I am assured of is that with all that went on for the tobacco industry in my State and other U.S. states all for just work involved with cigar wrappers, I still rejoice that I was "popped" out that day of the popcorn sky years ago, and for whatever reason, I’m still here.
THE END
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