As youngsters, I think we all tried to hide the fact that we were poor, as if being born with a plastic spoon in one’s mouth was an embarrassing birth defect.

But now that we have all grown up, we like to brag about our poverty. In fact it has  become kind of a contest: How Poor Were You?

Recently, I got into one of these contests with an old-timer who had been raised in a different era, and we compared childhoods to see who had it worse growing up.

“You’ve heard of the poor farm, haven’t you, Sonny?” he asked me. “Well, that is where I was raised. We had 10 kids in the family, and there was so little food to go around when we said grace at the dinner table, instead of clasping our hands we covered our plates.

“If you shut your eyes for one second around our place, you’d go hungry. Even the mice in our house had to go out for dinner.”
“My family was so poor,” I responded, “that we could not afford to have a large family. After my sis was born, we shot the stork just to have some meat to eat.”

“At least you had some meat on the table. Times were so tough on our farm that there wasn’t enough meat on our milk cow for one barbecue,” recalled the farmer. “Things were so grim growing up that I’ll never forget the time that I got a whole buffalo nickel for Christmas. I thought I was Rockefeller. Thought I’d never see another poor day. But even that old  buffalo started losing flesh around our place.”

“What’s a nickel?” I asked quizzically.

“My family was so destitute that when I was 10 years old,” continued the old-timer, “I came home from school one day and my family had up and moved on me.

“Left no forwarding address, no nothing. I had suspicions they’d moved out to California, and I was forced to make it on my own.”
“That kinda happened to me too,” I said. “I’ll never forget the time that my old man kicked me out of the house and said I’d have to make it on my own.”

“I know how hard that can be,” commiserated the old man.
“Yeah, and I was only 39 at the time,” I said, seeking sympathy.
“Once I was kicked out of the house, that began the really poor phase of my life. You’ve probably seen those commercials on the television where you are asked to send money to those starving folks in Africa. Well, after I got kicked out of the house, I was so destitute those Africans started sending me money.”

“Kid, you don’t know what hard times is,” said the old man. “When we were young, we had to do all the work on the farm cause we couldn’t afford to hire it done. I even had to break my back shearing the sheep.”

“You had sheep?” I replied, astonished. “We never could afford such luxuries as pets. Around our place we couldn’t even afford a pet peeve.”

“It was also my job to shoe all the horses on the place,” the old man continued. “We didn’t have all these fancy tractors with air-conditioned cabs that you have these days. All the work was done with teams of horses and mules, and back then the farrier charged a whole dollar a hoof. We couldn’t afford that.”

“You had to shoe all your horses yourself?” I asked disbelievingly, knowing what hard work that is.

“Well, all the horses except one, that is,” he replied, with a twinkle in his eye. “I remember one flea-bitten old stumpsucker in particular that would kick like a mule every time you got near his back feet.”

“So you paid the four dollars to have him shod, I hope?”
“Not exactly,” replied the old man. “We couldn’t afford the whole four dollars, so after the horseshoer shod the two back feet, we gathered up all our nickels and pennies and paid him off, much to his surprise. Then, I shod the two front feet.

“Remember young man, I said I was poor, not stupid.”

Readers with questions or comments for Lee Pitts may write to him in care of this publication.

This farm news was published in the June 2, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee.