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K: Was that another agricultural extension agent?
M: No. That was a private thing. You know how it is, I was paid by the taxpayers
and I was supposed to be doing this and that, but the government
bought back thousands of gallons of syrup for forty cents a gallon.
K: Who did you get it from?
M: From farmers.
K: What kind did you get?
M: Now,every farmer had syrup. He'd plant some acres for his own needs on up.
K: Cane syrup?
M: Yes. The largest producer I had would make about fifty-five hundred gallons,
and that was a pretty good operation for back then; they started to use evaporators
instead of a kettle. The evaporator was a continuous process, after it
cooked down and kept moving back, and the little stream of syrup coming out,
and the juice coming in, and back where the juice- was coming in, she was
really boiling, and sort of a self-skimmer, too, it would come out the side.
The kettle type, you always had your dipper taken off the skimming. But you
couldn't sell the syrup back in those days. Nobody had the money. It was
just luck that the government bought it up, and they were supposed to give it
to the people on relief. All it had to do was to weigh ten pounds a bucket,
you may have said specific gravity. We just weighed buckets among and
some of the buckets looked terrible, were rusted and everything. Anyway,
we'd load them in the cars and there they'd go (where they were heading, I
don't know). I handled that deal, you noticed that made me power of attorney.
K: That's right. What county was that in?
M: That was in Holmes County. I can give you that.
K: No, that sort of thing wouldn't be of any value to us. That's a power of
attorney and you had better keep that for your own files. Was that going
on all over Florida?
M: Yes. Up in Santa Rosa County, when I was working both places I shipped
several carloads up there, handled it. A county agent was handling it
because when I was working as a cotton adjuster, now I was sort of assistant
county, I handled everything a county agent would do. In other words, that's
really what I was, but my title had to be assistant to cotton adjustment,
because you get the money from that source.
K: I see. Was the money for assistant cotton adjustment, cotton adjuster, being
provided by the state or by the federal government?
M: By the federal government. Paid by the federal government. At that time, they
were taking ten percent of my salary and giving it to relief. I didn't like
that.
K: I bet you didn't.