Way back when in my early years of working for Stoll Family Farms, I was probably 16 or 17 at the time, my friend and I would go swimming in the creek that ran right behind the warehouse. At one point in time we used to go swimming almost every day. I’m not sure how we got away with it as it was a rather public place and the Amish tend to frown on the lack of clothes that swimming generally entails.
Well one day when got back we were a little slow in changing out of our swimming trunks. It was hot or something. We got started running in circles on the concrete floor. That turned into a real racing game, which turned into something else and, yeah we were just in no hurry to get back into our clothes.
Somehow or the other we got separated from our clothes by the presence of a staid old Amish gentleman. Someone who would have been mortified to see us in our skins. While the elderly gentleman was hollering, “Hello! Anyone around?” we retreated around the corner and up the stairs into the room where the boxes were stored. After some muttering under his breath about the lack of staff he decided to get what he came for himself. Well it so turned out he had come to get boxes. Wooops!!!! Fortunately there were a lot of nooks and crannies and we knew them all. We managed to escape detection but it was way too close.
There was an old outhouse out behind the barn that got used for all calls of nature. Trips to the out house were of a rather secretive nature. Somehow we started a tradition of throwing rocks onto the metal roof whenever we saw one of our buddies slip into the outhouse. One day my friend got smart. He made a run for the outhouse but instead of stopping he kept on going, circled the barn and came back up behind us and watched us belabor the roof with stones for a while before making his presence known. We were not impressed!
Then one the day we broke that tradition, permanently. My friend was sure he saw me enter the outhouse and made the most of the opportunity. But then the door opened and an elderly spinster rather cautiously emerged. Needless to say he beat a very hast retreat.
We worked a crazy schedule. It was nothing unusual for me to start work at 10 am and quit at 3 am the next morning. All that made for long days and having enough food to last the day was sometimes a problem. Incidentally, that was where I learned to cook. One day, because we wanted to make a point, we caught a sparrow in the barn, cooked it inside a squash and ate it. Then peddled the story to make it look like we were starving.
Every night after everything was done we had to take inventory for the book keeper. A most dreaded job. It was 2 am and we were weaving through the isles tired to a state of drunkenness, trying to get an accurate count of 30 different kinds of produce. There were several boxes of product simply missing. Gone. My uncle (at that point in time he was younger and could still be very funny) declared up and down and sideways that a Green Dragon had eaten them, all the while looking furtively at the dark dragon ridden corners. We reported the missing boxes as eaten by the Green Dragon. Unfortunately we failed to convince the book keeper, probably because it was no longer dark when she got there.
Several days later my cousin and I were at CAM sorting clothes when behold! A stuffed Green Dragon, spitting image of the one Uncle had seen in the dark corners, came down the clothes tube. Well that Dragon went home with us, lured by promises of all kinds of vegetables to eat. We perched him in a corner where Uncle was sure to see him and waited.
A little while later Uncle came by with a stern, I told you so look on his face. “See!”, he said, “I caught him!! He was in a box of half eaten squash. We are going to have to hang him.” And so we did. With a piece of fishing line fastened to the kerosene line for the lights.
Not long after we had simply too many squash. As if they had appeared out of nowhere. We concluded that the Green Dragon had repented and returned the squash he stole. How he managed that while dangling from a fish line we never did figure out.