Audio
Sweet Corn Competition
Transcript
David: “Mr. Bender was in competition with Mr. Szalay . . . Szalay senior. He would tell me, ‘David, I’ll be back in a few minutes.’ And then as I hear him coming, I look up in the sky, and there’s this column of smoke. Well, poor Mr. Bender always wanted to know what Szalays were using for fertilizer. And he’d go up and look at the fertilizer bags.”
Lee: “It was common practice to leave your bags there in the field after you emptied ‘em, and just leave ‘em there, let ‘em decompose. Well, Szalays put a match to ‘em, and burned ‘em. Now whether they did that so the Benders wouldn’t find out the Szalay secret or it was just cleaning up their mess we never knew, but Earva always thought, oh they did that on purpose so I couldn’t know what they were using.”
Description
2011 Oral History Project: David Darst and his daughter Lee, describe daily life on Earva Bender's farm.
Credit
David Darst
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