Back in the day, lots of young fellows around Inman and Woolsey worked a summer or two for Edward Ballard.
He had a reputation as a tough taskmaster, and the work on his farm was hard, but in my experience he wouldn’t ask you to do anything he wouldn’t do himself.
I enjoyed the time I worked for him. I made $1.90 an hour, which doesn’t seem like much, but it was a big step up from when Ricky Harp and I were bushhogging all over Fayette County for $5 per day. It also was comparable to my pay in the early days of Harp Grading when Ricky and I made $25 per day, before taxes were taken out, for driving dump trucks on jobs all over metro Atlanta. Our take-home pay was $100.31 a week.
The fun part of working with Mr. Ballard was getting to drive two-cylinder John Deeres, a WD Allis Chalmers, a Farmall Super C and other tractors that were already antiques relative to what most other farmers were using at the time.
He also had a fleet of 1.5-ton trucks that were a blast to drive. In harvest season, I’d drive straight from Fayette County High School to whatever field he was harvesting, and then one-by-one take the trucks to his home on Antioch Road near Inman and unload them.
I learned a lot about old iron from him. One Saturday morning, the generator on a Ford grain truck that he rarely used wouldn’t charge. He took a quart of kerosene and poured it on the brushes of the generator with the engine running. Eventually the generator kicked on and it worked fine all day.
My least favorite times were when I was cultivating soybeans just after the plants had come up. Driving a Super C, I had to creep along in first gear to keep from covering up the young beans while also getting rid of as many weeds as possible.
One of my favorite chores was cultivating those same beans when they’d grown enough to switch to second or third gear, where you could make much better time and the beans could stand having dirt rolled up next to them from both sides.
I also liked raking hay with the WD Allis while he followed on a bigger tractor with the baler. I had to make two rounds to his one, since you usually build a windrow by raking toward the middle of the field on the first pass and to the outside on the second.
Naturally, the raker was always trying to stay ahead of the baler. Occasionally, I’d get behind on my steering and leave a wide bubble of hay at the end of a windrow, which meant he’d have to back up to get all the hay in the baler. The next time we passed each other he’d be telling me to “tighten up those ends.”
No matter what we were doing or where we were working, we always went back to his house for a big noon meal. His wife Janice was a great cook and a wonderful lady, and those meals were always a treat.
As I got older and started farming on my own, I’d still try to drive tractors for him when he was in a pinch. Then he would pay me back when I was in a bind.
Mr. Edward Ballard
We also went to the machinery sale in Dothan, Ala., a few times. One night I was driving back home in his 1959 Ford F500. I nodded off down below Manchester, but just as I ran off the road, I woke up and got us back between the lines. He never raised his voice to scold me. He just said he’d hate to see that truck torn up. He added that he still had the original hand-written bill of sale in his wallet. He got it out and showed it to me. It was from a man in Rome.
Mr. Ballard never liked to loaf, although he would take a few minutes after our Saturday meals to watch some Roller Derby on TV. Phone conversations with him were usually pretty brief.
One night, after I’d started working a newspaper job in addition to farming, I called him about buying some oats to plant. We spent a good bit of time catching up, which was unusual, but I’m glad we had the chance. A couple of days later he lost his life in a wreck hauling a load of fertilizer.
Years later, when his family was liquidating his estate, I was able to purchase the WD Allis I used to drive and all of his old grain trucks. They all had sat for years, but I have gotten a few of them running again as well as the WD. My plans are to have them all going again at some point.
There are a lot of precious memories in that old iron.