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I learned how to work hard in a tobacco patch. And I learned about perseverance there — you finished the job even if you were exhausted, and you came back the next day whether you felt like it or not. Raising a crop of tobacco is where my father taught me to take pride in the quality of my work. To me, a tobacco leaf is a beautiful thing.

My brothers and I made our first serious money the year our father offered us the “leaf’ money. For all the leaves we picked up in the tobacco patch and the tobacco barn, we got the money. We became tobacco leaf vacuum cleaners. Not a leaf escaped us. We were leaf hawks. We got them all. That year we bought every rubber band the Ben Franklin 5&10 Cent Store had for sale. All the brown leaves that were half-way cured were banded in hands and hung on tobacco sticks. We carefully slipped the rubber bands down the leaves to give the stems room to finish curing. If the leaves had fat stems, we threaded them on electric fence wire. It was a simple process.

We attached the wire to the end of a tobacco stick, then ran the wire down the top of the stick. Then we threaded them, alternating the leaves on each side of the stick to keep them separated. When they were fully cured, it was not easy to get them off the wire. But it was worth the effort.

My father did not believe in leaving a leaf in the tobacco patch. I must give him credit. He had an eye for good tobacco. He also had an ear for breaking leaves. If we were cutting tobacco and he heard a leaf break, it would stop him in his tracks. If the transgressor was one of my brothers or me, a look was all it took. If the one breaking the leaf was a high school boy working with us for the first time, one of two things happened. My father would either instruct one of his sons to show the young man how it was done correctly, or my father would stop and patiently show how it was done. Breaking leaves was simply unacceptable.

Many a time while loading a load of tobacco, my father would point to the ground and say, “Pitch that leaf on the wagon.� But not the years when my brothers and I were the leaf hawks! If a broken leaf was clinging precariously to a tobacco stalk, we took it — no need to take the chance of it not making it to the barn.

When my father looked back on a tobacco patch after the last stick had been hauled to the barn, he liked to see two things — no tobacco leaves left on the ground,

and no weeds standing in the field. His tobacco patches looked like they had been swept clean. It’s just the way he went about his business.

In his declining years, my father would, while riding down the road, point to a recently harvested field of tobacco and observe, “Look a-yonder. Why, you can’t see the ground for the tobacco leaves!� Then he would shake his head in disbelief.

He would have had a hard time accepting the way tobacco was grown in the years after he retired when tobacco harvesters were paid by the stick and speed took precedence over quality of workmanship. Sadly, raising tobacco in this part of the world has almost become a thing of the past.

I still think a tobacco leaf is a beautiful thing. When I see one, I see dollar signs. And it is hard for me to imagine, as it would have been for my father, leaving dollars lying on the ground.