I don’t have a current story, so I will try to find something in memory that will interest you. After school was out in our junior year (1953) and senior year (1954) of high school, John Luding and I spent 2 or weeks baling hay. The end of May and early June was the time the alfalfa crops had grown high enough for the first cutting of the summer. John and I hired out to Paul Slagle, a contract baler, to get that first cutting taken care of. The alfalfa was cut or mowed by a mowing machine pulled by a tractor. Paul Slagle’s job was normally to cut, rake, bale, and stack the hay. If the farmer had the time and the implements, he might do the cutting and raking himself. After that initial work was done, Slagle would use his tractor and baling machine to bale the hay. If I recall correctly, Slagle had a Massey-Harris tractor and a New Holland (string-tie) baler.

To digress for a moment, baling machines originally used baling wire, but were later converted to string rather than wire.

After the alfalfa had been cut, it was then raked into a line as long as the field so it could be picked up by the baling machine. The tractor was continually moving forward so the bales of alfalfa were dropped several yards apart. Next, a tractor pulling a 4-wheel trailer came along and the bales were loaded aboard it.

Johnny and I were the guys that picked up the bales and loaded them onto the trailer. One of us would drive the tractor while the other walked alongside the trailer. When you came to a bale, you would reach down and snag it with your hay hook and pitch it aboard the trailer. When the floor of the trailer got crowded, the driver would stop the tractor, and both guys would neatly stack the bales to where they were 4 or 5 high (I forget which).

When the trailer was fully loaded, we would drive to the place where the farmer wanted the haystack, or we would take it and put it in the hay loft or barn.

If the hay was to be put in the loft, we pulled the trailer up close to the barn. One guy would get on the trailer, and the other would get in the doorway of the loft. The guy on the trailer would use his hay-hook to snag a bale and would raise it up as high as he could. The guy in the loft would reach down with his hay-hook and snag the bale and jerk it up onto the floor of the loft. Yes, this was work! When the floor of the loft got crowded, both guys would stack the hay until it was up to the rafters.

This was real work, but we gloried in it.

To be standing in a field just after dawn, with the sun coming up, the sky turning blue, a light summer breeze blowing, and the wonderful smell of that fresh cut alfalfa was heaven. Sweating and then feeling your muscles responding to every command made you feel alive. I loved it, and, to this day, I can smell the aroma of that newly cut alfalfa.

Dave Thomas

11/13/2025