Experience the wild roller coaster ride of a double addiction. It did not involve drugs, alcohol, or any of the other usual suspects, but an addiction to the very unusual combination of composting and farming. It started at a very young age and has lasted over forty years without interruption. Because of the addiction, my health, my family, and my well being never got in the way. It will be a great treat to meet all the wonderful mentors and roll models that was my great pleasure to work with and interact with. These people were all movers and shakers, they were all innovators, and they were all on the cutting edge. They could all handle a tense situation very smoothly whenever it arose, and all should have a book written about each of them. You will get a very close look at what it takes to compost and farm in a big time arena. What it takes as far as machinery, manpower, management, money, and the part mother nature plays in all of this. I could not have been born at a better time or in a better place. An exciting autobiography about a wonderful career and a cast of individuals that I would not trade for anything. They all allowed me to be green was green wasn't cool, and most importantly, to be compost when compost wasn't cool.
I Was Compost When Compost Wasn't Cool
My Forty Years of Trials, Tribulations, Failures, Successes, Mentors, and Memories in the Business of Composting and FarmingBy Stevan A. (Coach) BrockmanAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2010 Stevan A. (Coach) Brockman
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4520-4922-9Contents
Forward........................................................3Introduction...................................................5The Early Years................................................13Hay, Campbell Soup, And College................................25Family Growers And Campbell Soup...............................39Death, Farming, And The Ladies.................................51Compost Products; Birth And Death..............................61Life After The Mushroom........................................77Machinery, Innovation, And Imagination.........................97More Machinery And More Memories...............................111More People And More Problems..................................125Stable Bedding And Customers...................................137My Next Forty Years............................................145Acknowledgments; My List Of Most Respected.....................153
Chapter One
The Early Years
My two brothers and I all started out at about age seven or eight working for the local Greek truck farmers. There was about ten or twelve families around the Joliet area that produced a lot of fresh vegetables in the summer and "trucked" them to the Water Street Market in Chicago for sale. There were also a lot of summer jobs for kids that wanted to work. We would weed onions, pick green and yellow beans, pick lettuce, endive, asparagus, kohlrabi, beets, turnips, and tomatoes most of the time on our hands and knees. We would reap a solid thirty five to forty cents per hour. Not bad for the late fifties and I think this is where the government got the idea for minimum wage in this country.
My oldest brother got a job with Caterpillar in Joliet after he finished high school. Not long after he got hired, he was drafted by the army for a two year tour of duty that landed him mainly in Germany. When he came back, he went straight back to his same job at Caterpillar that he had left two years earlier. He also got involved with restoring old Chevy cars and has a collection of vintage automobiles who's value is doing much better than my stock market portfolio. He retired when he was only fifty two and he and his wife enjoy traveling and working with all his old cars.
My middle brother worked for the local ammunition plant making bombs after high school. After a few years there, he enlisted in the army for three years stationed in France for most of the time. After he came home, he got married and settled about twenty miles south of Joliet working at about four or five different jobs in the area. When the government decided to build the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery near Elwood, Illinois, my brother was the first to be hired and the first to be fired.
At this cemetery, when a single body is buried, the hole is dug about six foot deep. After digging, the operator jumps into the hole to square the corners up so the coffin will fit just right. When there is going to be two buried in the same hole, the operator digs down nine feet, places a protective devise around the hole so the dirt walls will not cave in on him or her when squaring the corners up. He was digging one of these deep holes and the boss came by and said, "there was not enough time to get and use one of the protective devises". My brother would not enter the hole without it, and got fired. He tried to appeal his dismissal to a local politician, but never got any satisfaction as the politician himself was charged with improprieties in Washington about the same time. My brother was fortunate to find another job, and moved on.
My sister, beside helping mom with the all the house chores, got a job near the high school when she was just a freshman. Four months after high school she got married, and lives only about a half mile from where she grew up.
She and I were only thirteen months apart in age. We did everything together most of are early years. One of the worst days occurred when she was about five years old. We were out near the garden and I was chopping down old cornstalks with of all things, an axe. For some unknown reason, she bent down in front of the path of the swinging axe and got struck in the head. I was mortified with her crying and the blood coming out of the cut on her head. We both ran into the house with a trail of blood left behind all the way from the garden and up the back steps. Mom calmly placed a cold wet rag over the cut, the bleeding stopped, and we all considered her very lucky.
The older I got, the more my physical labors drifted to local farmers who needed help baling and stacking hay, shelling corn out of corn cribs, and walking soybean fields to pull weeds and volunteer corn out between the rows. In the winter, I would hitchhike into Joliet and shovel driveways and sidewalks, and in the summer I would mow grass for some extra money. Some of the hardest work was picking sweet corn by hand early in the morning when all the dew was still on the plants. You would get soaking wet from the armpits down and no way to dry off. In 1958, I bought my first new bike with money earned picking green beans. I washed and waxed it almost everyday. I did make one mistake by riding it to my friends farm that had goats. The bike came with one foot long brightly colored streamers coming out of the handle bars that the goats found very tasty.
I might have had a little glimpse of compost at that early age by seeing some old rotten hay in the corner of the barn or by noticing that the pile of grass on the property line never got any bigger no matter how much grass I cut and piled there. I did realize that both produced an odor when they were disturbed.
I attended the local high school, but because of rheumatic fever in the winter of my eight grade and a wonderful agriculture teacher, I was able to leave school around one o'clock each day if I wanted for work related purposes. The school would not let me take physical education because of insurance reasons connected with the fever. That combined with study hall at the end of the day, meant I could leave after one pm if I wanted to.
Ron Deininger, my high school Agriculture teacher, would become a very important part of my life but did not realize it as a freshman. He was about fifteen years older than me. He never stopped working for as long as I have known him. He taught high school agriculture related classes during the day, drivers education during the afternoon and weekends, raised hogs and farmed at night and early morning before class. If chores for the hogs were part of the routine for that particular morning, hog manure could sometimes be smelled in the classroom. He was also our "FFA", Future Farmers of America, advisor for all four years. He pushed all the kids he had contact with to our limits each day. The biggest regret I had was not buying land as he suggested to do all the time. Over the years, he and his son and daughter have become very successful in their purchase of property.
One of the biggest highlight while in high school was being a part of the FFA. The high school was set in a rural atmosphere at the time I was attending. There were a lot of students from the rural areas around the east side of Joliet probably totaling about fifteen percent of the total enrolment. There was a lot of agriculture related classes devoted to these selected students and I tried to take all that I could. Most of the friends were from farm backgrounds where I was just from the country but enjoyed farm life. The four years of FFA under the supervision of Mr. Deininger were very enjoyable and educational. He entered us into every type of competition that was ever conceived. We had judging teams for grains, weeds, meat, poultry, dairy and beef cattle, soils, extemporaneous speaking and about a dozen other things that we competed for in our area and at the state level. He made time to drive us personally to either Champaign or Springfield, Illinois for the state judging contests on many occasions. During my four years and for a long time after I left high school, the Joliet Chapter of FFA was known through out the state as the one's to beat at any competition all because of Mr. Deininger. In my senior year I was picked as a Star State Farmer from the state of Illinois. I was up against guys who had large grain and livestock operations. I won because of my meticulous record keeping from all the farmers I worked for as a young kid and all the income earned from jobs I had done. Only one percent in any given year receive such an honor and was all because of Ron Deininger and his support.
When I did leave early from school, Mom would pick me up if she had the only car we had to avoid the six mile walk. When she did not have it, I would start walking and hitch hike home usually getting a ride in less than a minute. I would quickly get changed, and hitch hike another two or three miles to help some farmer in the area. It is sure amazing how well hitch hiking worked back then compared to now.
In the summer of 1965, I met Gorman O'Reilly from the eastern part of Joliet. He would eventually become my first full time employer. I owe everything I would become because of his tutelage over me the next seventeen years of my life. He was a very unique individual with both a strong mind and a strong back. His farm enabled me to work after class, on the weekends, and all summer long. He would even come and pick me up from school if he had time and take me home at night so I could do my homework. While I was in college, I would work any weekend I came home, and all summer long. The day I graduated from college, I started working fulltime for Gorman.
Gorman was the lone boy from a family of six girls. He was smart enough to finish high school by the time he was only sixteen, and asked his father if he could sign off for him to join the Navy by age seventeen. He did not see action but did get on a destroyer for a while during his tenure in the Navy. When he was discharged, he worked at a lot of hard labor type jobs and finally settled into farming in the early fifties. He settled on the home base of operations in the early sixties and is where I met him. I have always worked from a young age starting at eight or nine with the local truck farmers, by age fourteen I started working for grain and livestock farmers in the area, and by sixteen for Gorman.
I have always enjoyed being out in the fields as far back as when I went to my Grandparents farm. I was a little big for my age as far back as I can remember. In eight grade, I contracted rheumatic fever close to my birthday in January. I endured a temperature of 107 for about three days and the doctors felt that I probably would have some heart damage. My two week stay in the hospital included a steady diet of Jello, morning, noon, and night because my throat was so inflamed. My late night snack would also be Jello. It took the better part of thirty years to enjoy Jello in my diet once again. When it came time to help local farmers with all the labor involved with Spring planting, I went right back after it with no side effects, but against my mother's wishes.
Having to go through a two week hospital stay was probably the low point of my year in eight grade. The high point had to be that Jesse Owens, one of my role models and a person that I studied and looked up to, was the commencement speaker for our graduation ceremony. Don't ask me how he was talked into coming to Joliet and speak to a bunch of eight graders, a class of less than sixty, but there he was and I was able to get his autograph on my program. I have always cherished that night and that autograph. Come to think of it, I only have two autographs in my possession. The other is of Pete Rose on a baseball that cost me twenty dollars and about an hour of my time. Despite his problems with gambling, I still think he was one of the best to ever play the game.
I have also enjoyed football ever since I can remember. Us kids always had a football game going in the front yard with some of the neighbors. My grade school did not offer football, but it did have basketball, baseball, and track that I did participate in and receive all area honors. In the late summer of 1965, I tried out for the freshman football team at my new high school and liked the running back position. It was a very common practice to line up all the varsity lineman and have the little freshman try and run through this wall of humanity on the first day of practice. My first pass through and all sixteen varsity lineman were laid out on their backs wondering what had hit them. For me, a little big for my age, it was nothing compared to baling and stacking hay all day. All the coach's saw what had just happened and immediately wanted me to go from the freshman team to the varsity team overnight. I went home that night hardly able to get my head in the house. The next day, I received a varsity outfit and was all set to go at it again until one of the coach's came up to me to inform me of non-insurability because of the rheumatic fever I had nine months earlier. I could not play football, I could not take gym, so I scheduled my classes so I could leave the school at one in the afternoon and go home to do heavy physical labor on some farm. My football career was over.
There was no extra money for me to attend college, but because of that wonderful agriculture teacher from high school, a full ride, all expenses were covered by a seldom used scholarship that he was able to uncover for me. The scholarship came out of the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation from the state of Illinois. I had developed severe pain in the arch of both feet at about the age of twelve. Since dad had very good insurance, mom took me to a foot doctor that explained that my foot grew a lot faster than the tendons holding the arch together causing the bad pain near my heal. He suggested a series of steroid injections right where it hurts. The pain from those injections was far worse than the pain from the actual problem. He stuck me ten times in each foot over a two year period with little relief. I can still feel those injections in my sleep some forty years later and wished I had never done that. I had mentioned to Mr. Deininger that I had under went this treatment and he must have put it in his mind somewhere and brought it out when it was needed. A four year ride, all expenses, and all I had to do was maintain a 3.5 grade average and get myself to the school. There is never a way to thank him for this and a lot more.
During my high school and college days, Gorman farmed a lot of U.S. government owned land that was known as the Arsenal. This area that encompassed more than forty thousand acres near Elwood, Illinois was taken, literally, from the landowners back in 1940 and 1941 so a military reservation could be built to produce bombs and ammunition for World War Two. There were 420 farm families uprooted and moved off the property for a price of less than three hundred dollars per acre, no more and no less. Everybody got the same price no matter where you lived on this forty thousand acres. Some of the land was the most productive in Will County, some was the least productive. All got the same price.
My wife's uncle tells the story that his father and uncle, two of the largest landowners in this whole uprising, fought the government for two years and ten thousand dollars in court fees only to receive their walking papers and the same price as everybody else. Her uncle is ninety five and still gets furious over what the federal government can do to a person if they want to. A lot of people wonder why this site was picked. Some thought of the good rail system in place. Some thought there was good water and road transportation. My wife's same uncle believes the real story is that the federal government looked at forty thousand acre parcels around the greater Chicago area and discovered this particular parcel had more money loaned against it than any other they could find. The government thought these farmers would fold very easily because of the financial burden and they were right. Everything was bought in less than two years.
All of this land was located about ten miles south of Gorman's headquarters near the town of Elwood, Illinois. Anything the government deemed excess and was not torn up with railroad tracks or buildings was leased back to farmers to farm on a five year cash rent basis. At first, so many farmers were mad at the government that a lot of the land was not farmed at all. Parcels were rented out for next to nothing and government officials actually went out into the area trying to entice farmers to take advantage of the situation. Gorman started to farm some of this land back in the late fifties.
There was one big stipulation to farming this land. You could not grow any government supported crops like corn, soybeans, or wheat. What was allowed was popcorn, hay , vegetables, or the pasture of animals. When I started to work for Gorman, he had a good deal of each. His hay acreage was devoted to mainly Alfalfa. Most farmers shied away from this because of the intensive amount of labor involved, but not Gorman. He possessed both a strong mind and a strong back. A lot of his production went to horse and dairy farms in the area and for his own use with his herd of beef cows. His popcorn production went to Cracker Jack and Jolly Time on a contract basis. More about the hay and popcorn later in the book.
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Excerpted from I Was Compost When Compost Wasn't Coolby Stevan A. (Coach) Brockman Copyright © 2010 by Stevan A. (Coach) Brockman. Excerpted by permission.
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