Now, Ray Lang, the father of Howard, was a real smart business man. And he was in Hoffman, MN! And everyone in Hoffman knew of Ray Lang. But then he was in Benson, when I knew him. And he invented the bluegrass stripper machine. You know that that is?
Oh, I used to ride one for a dollar a day when I was a kid, but anyway, bluegrass seed is expensive. Well what they do is … bluegrass out in the field it would grow about this high, and when it was ripe the seeds were all up her on top here. They didn’t fall off. But, the blue grass stripper was essentially a box about this wide, about that deep, and open in front. It had a cover. Open in front, and on an axle there was a drum about that big – oh, not that big – about that big. Nails, all over it. And it was geared to the wheels. And it was pulled by a tractor. And, there would be one there, and this one would hook on, and this one would hook on, and there’d be 3 or 4 of them. And some farmer would take his John Deere … little tractor ,,, and he would pull you around through the blue grass, and that would spin at high spped, and it would knowck the seeds back into the box.
And our job was to take the … it would pull a whole weed out of the ground and throw it back in there, too. So we would shake the seeds off, and throw that out of there, and shut the box, and ride along.
He invented that, and made millions on blue grass.
And one day, I lifted it up just as it shredded a shiedpoke … an American bitern, oh, a bird. A bitern is one of these, it has stripes, and when it is scared it stands up in the weeds and grass straight up … and you can’t see it. Well, this machine doesn’t care if you see it or not. So, as we approached, this thing did that, apparently, and as I lifted the box off, I got sprayed by a shredded shiedpoke, we called them slew-pump becuase they go (pump-like sound) , that’s how, they don’t go cheep-cheep like birds do. It’s a pumping sound. So I got shiedpoke, or slew-pump, all over me as the tractore driver, this farmer, turned around and here’s one of the guys covered in blood and guts, and he thought I’d fallen into the thing, and he almost had a heart attack. So I went over to a slew and jumped in, and flat on my face, and cleaned up and went back to riding.
(Joe) And how old were you?
Twelve, something like that. I got paid a dollar a day, but a day was as long as they could find some bluegrass. It was fun.
Yeah, as I lifted the box I could saw it coming. It just got me.
They were accurate, you know what I mean? We would go to work out on the railroad, We’d go to work on these little gas carts, you know … trailer, trailer, trailer. We had 56 kids on our crew, and 10 adults. And we’d all go out on tose rigs, so they would stretch from here to the cars out there, and we’d move right along. And those shypokes would fly by, and get ya. It would – right on you – it wouldn’t miss, it would get somebody on that train, It was terrible. I was lucky, I never got hit.
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