Page 43 - Sorghum

Dr. E. W. Branyon’s Bio
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provided water for the school, fetching monkey wrenches or a piece of pipe. The well needed to be over a hundred feet deep to get to the clean water so it wouldn’t be contaminated from fecal matter from outhouses and livestock. That could cause typhoid fever.
Whole families would get typhoid. A family of a friend got it, and some of them died. Now there’s a vaccination. Polio was endemic also, and scared everyone to death. In the summertime and early fall they’d close the churches, and we wouldn’t take trips or be in crowds. We’d also paint our noses with yellow pitric acid, which didn’t help but we thought it did. With polio you’d wake up with fever and two days later be paralyzed, like FDR.
Anyway, we’d have to fix the well because either the pipe would leak or the leather shoe at the bottom that sealed the suction would rip, and we’d have to install a new one. While taking the pipe out it would sometimes become unscrewed from the other pipe and you’d have to try to screw it back in, fifty feet away through the thin, bore hole. That required a thirty-foot- high rig and I was mesmerized by the process.
One day the workman ordered me to go to the hardware store and get a skyjack. I went and the store owner laughed: “You’ve been had.