Why Flarda? That’s not Florida.
It’s simple. That’s how I remember growing up saying it in North Central Florida – North Suwannee County to be exact, before I moved around, grew up, and got educated and became “cultured”. Times were simpler then. I grew up on my Grandpa Eugene Turman’s tobacco farm in the 80s. Grandpa had given his children a couple of acres spaced out perfectly around the farm, to this day we call ‘the block’. I remember being dropped off by the bus at my Grandma & Grandpa Gene’s house after a long day of school. After watching “Woody Woodpecker,” I would walk home, breaking into my cousin’s home to eat all their cookies.
Every summer, all the kids would work in the tobacco fields to earn money for school clothes. It was early mornings – meet at the barn at 6:00 to work at Grandpa’s or we would all load up in an old truck and drive across the Suwannee to Hamilton County to work at my Uncle Joe Mathis’. Unloading the barn consisted of taking the cooked tobacco out of the racks and loading it into the large square burlap sheets. I remembered starting out as a packer. I would walk in circles of this big 5′ round metal ring packing down the tobacco while everyone was putting tobacco in, trying to keep my balance to stay on top of the cooked tobacco they were putting in around me and always being on the hunt for green stems to make sure they never got included. After the barn was unloaded, it was off to the fields.
I started out driving the two-story tobacco harvester after I had mastered Grandpa’s rear-engine Snapper mower between 10 and 12 years old. Driving the two-story harvester was ‘an experience’. It was literally a two-story 3 wheeler with one big tractor wheel sitting under the motor and two smaller wheels under the trailer. Now imagine 12 year old me driving with 8 others on board consisting of 2 bucket ladies, 2 rackers, and 4 croppers on the seats down below. The croppers would sit about 6 inches off the ground, cropping and putting the tobacco in a conveyor belt that would carry it to the top story and drop it in the large metal buckets. The bucket ladies would scoop it all up and place it into the rack spacing it out evenly so it would cook thoroughly. Once a rack was full, the table would rotate around to the rackers where they would shove the splines through the rack fastening it and placing the rack on the trailer – hanging off the back of the harvester.
After I drove for a year or two, Enoch Webb taught me how to crop. Yes! I had graduated to cropping, nearly doubling my money from $10/day to $18/day for a small barn and $20/day for a large barn. BIG Money to a 12 year old. I could picture the new Huffy dirt bike I was going to get from the Western Auto Store in downtown Live Oak!