Ruminations on the value of money and pipes
During the seventies in the Ozarks every mile along the roads there seemed to be a little dairy farm, and dairy cows need high quality hay to get through the winter, and old men would just die trying to haul hay alongside teenagers like I was.
I learned then the importance of looking like somebody an old man could trust. I also learned not to trust any old man (old man being over about 35) unless I surveyed their operation to know they wouldn’t cheat me.
I wanted about a thousand bales at 25 cents a bale deal, and if I got a call I guarantee you my crew would put up a thousand bales of hay in your barn perfectly, stacked, punched in, not too loose and not too tight, and if you had a wife to feed us fine, if not I fed my crew.
I tried to always pay my crew more. Usually a nickel a bale when the going rate was two or three cents. I hired a driver who only drove, for a penny a bale.
I fed my crew anything they wanted at a good cafe.
And at the end of the day my driver, a boy named Billy who couldn’t even lift a hay bale, had ten dollars and could buy himself a pipe.
It was illegal. We were all under age. We didn’t have any insurance. There were no taxes paid.
My wife and I know a young man who has a labor crew.
When I closed my office and retired I had a loft full of files that needed hauled down to a shredder truck.
He sent four of his best laborers and eight hours later and $200 cash each my problem was solved. Perfectly. Better than I could have done it.
I doubt any of his crew smoke a pipe.
But if they did, look what they can buy with one day’s labor.
Why estate pipes are worth what they are is because of old men buying baubles, they wanted when they were young men.
Mostly our pipes sell geezer to geezer, you know?