Jack Mitchell

I am writing this week’s column just a couple of hours after speaking at Jack’s funeral. Jack Mitchell may well be the toughest man I have ever known. He was a character and teacher in one of the most important chapters in my life. Jack taught me the most valuable lesson I have ever learned and that was the value of hard work. I spent at least three summers on Mitchell family hay wagons where many times we would put up well over 100,000 bales a summer. I have to laugh when I hear people talk about ‘haulin hay’ and they use numbers in the hundreds when we dealt in thousands. The Mitchell family has been in the hay business for many years and in the days before round bales, they provided a much needed service for many area farmers doing the kind of work that many were unable to do. On a good day, when everything was working and we didn’t have any breakdowns, it was not unusual to put three thousand square bales in the barn in a day’s time.
I was talking to my old friend Greg Tugman and his brother Mike, who spent as much time on their wagons as I did, and we all agreed “we would hate to have to do that today.” We were young and tough and conditioned to the heat and worked from 7:30 in the morning until sometimes after midnight, seven days a week. Looking back, Jack was probably in his mid-fifties then and he drove a truck during the day for Graves Freightline. We would start in the morning with his son Melvin who had worked for the City of Lawton until midnight the night before. It didn’t matter, we started at 7:30. Jack would get off about 4:00 and would come home and climb on the wagons about the time Melvin was going to work. Greg and I got to work both shifts. But, it was a valuable lesson and it serves me well even today because I learned how to work from people like the Mitchell family who knew the value and instilled that work ethic into a young, skinny kid, not knowing that it would be the most valuable lesson I would ever learn.
It was always a treat when we were hauling hay somewhere close to the Mitchell’s “home place” because Jack’s mother, Mary who we all called “Granny Mitchell”, would always cook a big spread. It was like a feast with fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy and who knows what else. That was rare but memorable because most days, it was “baloney” sandwiches and cold Dr. Pepper with mustard that was always kept in the glove box of the pickup. We would wear out a pair of gloves about every two days. When the blisters between your fingers got broken, you just moved the hay hooks in between another set of fingers and kept going. We also wore out a pair of leggins’ at least every year and treated wasp stings with Garrett Snuff. We prayed for rain on a daily basis, seldom if ever getting our prayers answered. We went about the business of putting up winter forage for cattle across Comanche County and points beyond.
There are enough hay haulin’stories to fill a book. I will never forget one summer when we hauled prairie hay at Ft. Sill for the “Hunt Club” where all the little fancy military girls kept their Hunter jumper horses. We pulled in on the East Range and saw 9,000 bales spread out across endless rows in that native grass pasture. It was the roughest haul that I remember and you could barely stay on the wagon because of the holes from years of artillery shells. I even remember one day on that particular hay field when I grabbed a bale of grass hay and flipped it over, only to find a rattlesnake sticking out. It didn’t take long to jump back and make sure it was dead. It was tough, brutal, hot work. I can only remember quitting because of excess heat two times during the time I worked for them. We didn’t need the weatherman on TV to tell us to drink plenty of water. We had no time for heat advisories. We had hay to get in and we got the job done. We made lots of money. Although it was not much per hour, we just worked lots of hours. I think over the years, I have given it all back to various chiropractors but we would never dare whine. There were only two periods in the summer that we could count on not working. One was the Fourth of July. Not the whole weekend, just the day. The other, was the Lawton Rangers Rodeo week. Make no mistake, we did not get the week off. We just got off early enough to go to the rodeo.
I doubt if Jack Mitchell really realized what he was doing for me. Many times I thought he was trying to kill me. But again, as I stated earlier, it was probably the most valuable lesson I ever learned. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Jack and his family for making me who I am and instilling a “never say quit” work ethic into a skinny kid. I said at Jack’s funeral “if we could put Jack Mitchell in charge of this whole generation of young people today, this country would be way more productive, a lot less whiny and we would not need welfare”. I will never be as tough as Jack but I owe him. So, I just wanted to spend this week’s column saying “thank you Jack, and may you rest in peace.”