labor were applied upon it. Again, remember that HUMAN LABOR is the cheapest commodity under the sun! Can you utilize it to your advantage? Can you direct its use in some marketable service or product whereby you reap a bountiful harvest? I have employed workers as far back as I can remember, here and there, even back in Oklahoma in my teens. When I was a High School boy, it was the custom for a farmer to have the pecan trees thrashed on his place by someone else. It was a dangerous job to climb and thrash trees, especially if you were a farmer well along in years. Pecan harvesting was so hazardous that it was customary to gather the crop for 50% of the harvest. Indians were best suited for this kind of work and could best do it, but what decent Indian would think of work if he were drawing Indian relief? I made arrangements with several farmers in the river bottom areas to thrash their pecans. Some had groves of them, some had only a few trees. Thrashing begins after the first few frosts and lasts well into December, a period covering as much as two months. Some trees yield as much as two to three hundred pounds of pecans and these trees can be mammoth affairs to boot. With pecans at .15 a pound on the market at that time, I did very well. I climbed trees in the evenings after school and hired other school boys to help me. I had boys and girls gathering nuts from under the trees. On some Saturdays a crew of us managed to thrash five or six of these trees and come up with as much as eight hundred to one thousand pounds of pecans, half of which was mine. In those days wages were only $7.00 an hour for men or boys. I paid off my helpers and often managed to come out with $500 or more for a day's work. But tree skinning wasn't to my liking and for a few seasons pecans never bore because of adverse weather conditions during the spring season. I got the wanderlust too, even before I finished High School. Otherwise, I imagine I would still be down there signing up every farmer with a contract to harvest and market his pecans. I had great ambitions about it at that time. The point to grasp here is that I, by myself, could have done very little in the way of thrashing pecans and gathering pecans. If I had been working for someone else I might have received $7.00 an hour for my labor. But, as it was, I hired others to help me, paid them the 7.00 per hour and made a tremendous profit thereby.
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