The Barefooted Farmer Boy

George Peck was a late 19th, early 20th century humor writer. The following is from his Sunbeams: Humor, Sarcasm and Sense, published in 1902. The book is made up of stories that originally appeared in Peck’s newspaper, The Sun.

There’s a lot of essential truth in the story.

 

          The Barefooted Farmer Boy

A farmer’s boy writes The Sun from his home in the interior as follows:

“Is it any disgrace for a fourteen-year-old boy to go barefooted on the farm, or when he rides a plowhorse into town to have a plow point repaired? What makes me ask is that people at the summer resorts near our farm, when they drive along the road and see me barefooted, stop the horses and have fun with me, and seem to enjoy looking at my tracks in the road, and when I go to the village where they spend the summer playing tennis and golf, they surround me on the main street and look at my bare feet and legs as though I was a freak from a sideshow. One young fellow with a girl said that if he was in my place he would paint his legs a nice warm color and have a red dado where my trousers’ legs leave off. They make me more tired than hoeing corn.”

Well, don’t let the chaffing you receive from the people who wear canvas shoes worry you. They don’t mean any harm or disrespect. They are out for fun, and can afford to have fun, and to them you are a part of the show. If their fathers were with them the fathers would shut them up mighty quick. Very likely the fathers of every one of those young people, who are so rich now, never wore a shoe in summer before they were 20 years old. Nearly all of the rich men of the cities were brought up on farms, and they would like nothing better than to go to your farm, take off their shoes and go around barefooted, and help you hoe corn, if they could do so without being caught at it by their society friends.

The leading men of this country have large feet that they got by going barefooted. Lincoln’s feet were so big that he was always joking about them, and he went barefooted and pawed up the soil of Illinois and Kentucky with his toe-nails. If anybody could find a petrified barefooted track of old Abe, down in Sangamon county, nowadays, the person who found it would become rich, and the people of the whole country would worship that track, and it would be framed in gold and deposited in a safety-deposit vault. Grant didn’t have any shoes when he was a boy, and he has worked on a farm and rode a horse to plow corn, and his trousers worked clear up to his knees, and yet if these boys that make fun of you could own those old trousers Grant wore when a boy, they would not part with them for a fortune.

Garfield’s barefooted tracks on the tow path of the canal where he led the mules to haul the boats, if they could be found now, would sell for more than the canal. Phil. Armour used to go barefooted to school, and he has got one toe-nail that is a total wreck from the stroke of a hoe when he was digging potatoes barefooted, on the old home farm, and he is as proud of that demoralized toe-nail as he is of a packing house. Marshall Field can to day go out on a farm barefooted and beat lots of you boys hoeing corn, and he could ride a horse to plow corn and never let the plow touch a hill, or let the hungry horse bite a blade of the new corn, because he would rest his toes on the tugs of the harness, and keep his heels kicking the old horse all the time, and he would be happier than he is in his big store, and hungrier when the horn blew for dinner than he is now when the lunch hour comes, and he has to eat soup because solid food hurts him. McKinley could leave the white house and go out on a farm in haying time, with a hickory shirt on, and an old straw hat, and he could take a scythe and mow a swath and make any farmer hustle to keep up with him.

Bryan would like nothing better than to forget, for a few days, that there is any such thing as money, good, bad or indifferent, and go to a farm where barefooted boys were plenty, take off his boots, throw the lines over his shoulder, and with a span of good horses, plow a ten-acre lot, and every furrow would be as straight as the life he has led, and every inch of the soil would be plowed to the same depth, honestly, and the chances are more than sixteen to one that if there was a boiled dinner when the boys went to the house, he wouldn’t do a thing to it, and he would enjoy it better than he does these banquets at ten dollars a plate, and before he went to dinner he would haul up a bucket of water with the old windlass and tip it up on the well curb and drink half of it, and let the water drip from his face down onto his flannel shirt, open at the collar, down onto his bare feet, and his eyes would sparkle after the drink, and you boys would say he was one of the grandest partners boys ever had on a farm.

Some day, when The Sun gets rich, it will have a farm, just to invite the distinguished men that were farmers’ boys, to come out and visit with each other, and take off their boots and put on hickory shirts, and run wild, and have fun with each other, and mingle with the barefooted boys of the present generation, to show them that there is no disgrace in going barefooted on the farm, if an occasional person who ought to know better does have fun with them. So, boys, you go right on barefooted, let the green grass color your legs, and the tickle grass crawl up your trousers legs, follow the woodchuck dog when you have time, never mind the patches, and when these boys who make fun of you are dying from smoking cigarettes, you can go to the cities with strength, nerve, and good health, and take their places in the business
world, and wear big shoes, made of yellow leather. Don’t you worry.

As though I was a freak from a side show