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Transcription: [00:41:39]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
Me and him we went over to one of those fancy clubs and we drinking and playing the slot machines.
[00:41:45]
Pretty soon we were just really feeling good.
[00:41:49]
That-- that time we saw three of the biggest Italian guys walk in and sit down at the table that you ever saw.
[00:41:56]
They just had mafia written all over 'em.
[00:41:59]
I told my father I said 'Let's go over there and beat the hell out of them guys.'
[00:42:05]
He said 'Yeah that sounds like a good deal.'
[00:42:10]
We walked right over to the table, and they looked up at us.
[00:42:13]
I said, 'you better buy us a drink or we're gonna to rip all your arms right out of your body.'
[00:42:20]
Boy, they all three just started to raise up
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and I know they are just going to wipe us out one slap.
[00:42:28]
And one of them must had thought how humorous it was, how ridiculous, he started laughing,
[00:42:32]
The other two start to laugh, and pretty quick we had more drinks there than we could handle.
[00:42:37]
So we proceeds to really lie to them, tell them about the little organization we had going
[00:42:43]
and how much money we was making
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and they knew we was lying but for some reason or other
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the more we lied, the more ridiculous we must have seemed to them, and the more they laughed.
[00:42:54]
But we sure got a lot of free drinks, didn't we?

[00:42:57]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
Yeah

[00:42:59]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
Ha ha ha. That's a true story.

[00:43:02]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 3"}
(Interviewer)...what about your poling hogs?

[00:43:06]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 4"}
Oh yeah, I mentioned like I do odd jobs, you know, like pulling that dynamite
[00:43:11]
and playing these folk festivals and stuff to help support my cause
[00:43:16]
but when I moved to Arkansas, I moved there from California in '54.
[00:43:20]
It was at the end--the last year of a three-year drought.
[00:43:24]
Now we had lots and lots of droughts that lasted all summer, and maybe even half a year.
[00:43:30]
But that was a three-year drought and I'm telling you things is pretty tough.
[00:43:35]
But the place I bought hadn't had anything on it a few years and I wasn't in too bad of shape,
[00:43:40]
although it was awful dry,
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but I was looking around for something to do and it was in the fall of the year
[00:43:48]
and there was free range there then, you could run your cattle out in the woods or any place that wasn't fenced
[00:43:54]
you could run cattle or hogs or whatever you wanted out there
[00:43:57]
and these hogs that run the woods in the fall and winter are what we call 'mast fed hogs',
[00:44:04]
and mast- that's acorns that falls out of the trees, and they just cover the ground sometimes,
[00:44:10]
and these hogs will get fat on acorns and they don't have to buy expensive feed and give it to them.
[00:44:18]
But three years of drought- the acorns wasreal small they didn't have any weight to them
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and they wouldn't fall they just stayed up in the trees,
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they wasn't heavy enough to fall.
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So one of my neighbors that had a lot of hogs in the woods says
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'I'll hire you, the pay ain't very good and it's an awful tough job but it's something to do'
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I says 'well what is it', he says, 'poling hogs'
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I had never heard of it, and I says "well how do you do it?"
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and then he showed me and I got on the crew with all the other hog polers
[00:44:46]
and what you do, you cut you a good strong pole,
[00:44:51]
and you whittle it real smooth on one end
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and you put the smooth end on one end of the hog
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and hold the front end of em up in the trees so they can graze on acorns
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because they ain't fall down, you see
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and you get about a 2-300 pound hog and it's a terrible tough job.
[00:45:09]
I mean, if you're smart enough to cut the pole long enough
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you can set the end of it on the ground and then you kind of got to balance them
[00:45:16]
but getting them up there is really tough
[00:45:19]
and it isn't the sort of thing everybody would want to do probably
[00:45:23]
but in fact the only thing I liked about it at all was at night when we quit poling hogs and sat around the campfire
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and they sang their hog poling songs and told their hog poling stories and stuff like that.
[00:45:37]
That was kind of nice, I enjoyed that part of it.
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[[laughter]]
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[[clapping]]