The Life of a Lineman

By Michael Byrd

The Life of a Lineman shares the life of a young man with only a high school education who served his country and then transitioned into the fascinating world of electrical powerline work. This book provides stories from an era gone by in the powerline industry to the intriguing 50-year career of a lineman who retired as a manager of safety and training. His journey will inspire young and old, and hopefully will encourage others to embark on this adventure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887314211

Book preview

Chapter 1

From the Tobacco Fields to the Utility Poles

I was born on December 15, 1951, and grew up on a tobacco farm in Clinton, North Carolina. I was a country boy who grew up working in the fields. Mama and Daddy were tobacco farmers. This was considered the cash crop when I was growing up. I was driving a Farmall F140 tractor when I was eight years old. This was my early life. It was hands-on work and hard work for a young boy. It was physically demanding at times, but I gained a respect for the hard-working men and women who were farmers. My family all worked together on the farm. It was how my parents were able to support our family.

Keep in mind, this was during the late 1950s and through the 1960s. We did not have any of the tobacco harvesting equipment and bulk barns that were later used by the tobacco farmers. I was raised in an era gone by, but this was a valuable part of my growing up that taught me about hard work and completing tasks, working together as a team, and being motivated.

Usually, early in the month of May, we would set (plant) our tobacco fields. By the middle of June, we would harvest (crop) by hand the tobacco. This meant each week, four individuals were in the fields going down each row of tobacco and harvesting a few leaves from each stalk of tobacco. I was one of the little boys who drove the tractors; and then I grew up and was one of the boys cropping the sandy, dirty, sometimes wet tobacco leaves. We got wet with sweat and from the early morning’s dew on the tobacco.

The harvested leaves were placed in a slide/trailer. This slide/trailer was made of wood and had burlap bags fastened with soda bottle caps that were nailed through the burlap to the wood railings surrounding it. Occasionally, Daddy would take the tobacco to the barn area. I think he also wanted to keep his eye on the progress at the barn since Mama was in charge there. He always told her that he was just checking to see how many sticks of tobacco we had looped. With that information, he could decide about what time to stop in the afternoon to hang the tobacco in the barns. There were many looks between the two of them when this was discussed at our evening meals.

When the load made it to the tobacco barn shelter area, there was a person whose job was to unload each trailer of tobacco onto a long bench, and then the tractor driver would take the empty trailer back to the field. While one trailer was going to the barn with the harvested tobacco, another trailer was being filled with the harvested green leaves in the fields.

Two to three people would stand at the bench where the tobacco had been taken from the trailer and placed on the bench. These individuals were usually other family members or additional people we had hired to help us. They picked up several leaves and made small bundles of the green harvested tobacco. They then handed it to another family member (usually women) performing the looping process. A tobacco stick rested on an apparatus we called the looping horse. Usually, there were two of these and two individuals whose job was to loop the tobacco onto the tobacco sticks, which meant there were three people at each looping location. Like I said, these were aunts, uncles, and cousins helping with the process at the barn area and in the field. Families helped one another during the summer months to harvest their tobacco.

Each green bundle was tied/looped with string onto the tobacco stick. When each stick was looped, finished, and tied at the end, someone would remove the stick and hang it up in the racks under the barn shelter. The tobacco had to be looped tightly to stay on the stick so when it was handed/passed up to the guys on the tier poles in the barn, it would not slide off the stick. Daddy was real strict about this.

We barned tobacco about four to five days a week. At the end of each day, we would hang the sticks of harvested tobacco in the tobacco barns. The barns were heated with oil heaters to cure out the tobacco. This would take several days. Daddy checked the barns each day, several times per day and at night before he went to bed just to make sure the temperature was right and that everything was safe. When the tobacco had cured out, we were up on some mornings as early as three thirty to take the tobacco out of a barn so we could use that barn for that day of harvesting. The cured sticks of tobacco were taken out of the tobacco barn and stacked on a long trailer. Daddy usually did the stacking. He knew how much tobacco to put on the trailer and how to stack it so it would not fall off while transporting it. A tractor was used to take the trailer of cured tobacco to another large barn so it could be stored until it was graded and sold. Several trips were made to get all the cured tobacco from the barn. Then the process of filling up the tobacco barns for curing started all over again.

On mornings that we didn’t have to get up early to take a barn of tobacco out, Daddy expected us to be ready to go by six thirty. That meant getting up, getting dressed, eating breakfast, and getting ready to go to work. We had four tobacco barns for curing the tobacco. Every day, we would fill one of the barns for curing, take the cured tobacco out when ready, and store it until it was time to prepare it for selling. This was a cycle throughout the weeks of each summer while I was growing up until the tobacco was completely harvested.

Daddy also planted green peppers, cucumbers, and squash in early summer. When we weren’t working in tobacco, we were picking, cleaning, and putting the produce in wooden baskets. Daddy would take this produce to the farmer’s market to sell on Saturday.

In late summer when the entire crop of tobacco had been harvested and cured, we would begin to get it ready to sell it. It, again, was a family matter. We worked from the packhouse for this part. The tobacco was moved from the large storage barn to the packhouse. This was a smaller building where the tobacco was sorted and got ready to sell.

We removed the cured tobacco bundles from the tobacco sticks. Daddy would grade the tobacco, which meant that he would stand at another long bench in our packhouse and inspect each tobacco bundle after it had been removed from the tobacco stick. He would separate the tobacco leaves from each bundle. This was called grading. He would grade the tobacco into stacks/piles.

The bright, beautiful cured leaves would be in the first pile; the next would be those leaves that were bright but torn or damaged. The third pile would be the trash leaves, which meant they were burnt, torn, and brittle. The final stack would contain all the green leaves that didn’t get cured out all the way and were probably not going to be