I'm going to tell you a bit about life in upstate NY in the late 1940s. You may know it as the close of the bronze age. At that time a few farmers were still using horses to work their fields. Archie, one of those farmers was a real character alright. I knew that even then as a boy of 10 years or so. I spent a lot of time at his farm, a mile away through the woods, as he had a handful of boys and, in addition to the draught horses, two for riding. One was a beautiful white pony with a black heart. He once ran away with me at a full gallup right into the barn. I thought I was going to die.
The other horse was a young gelding with a gentile disposition. I don't remember if I was about to go for a ride or had just returned from one. I do remember sitting on an old cavalry saddle that had a slot down the middle and was very uncomfortable. Perversely, in a quirk of the universe, my current bike saddle has a slot also but is very comfortable. Suddenly, Archie whipped off his hat, a railroad engineer type that was then sold at Agway, and slapped the gelding on the rump. The horse bolted, I did a cartoon type flip and landed on my tailbone. Archie, of course, thought this was hilarious while I had to suffer rough country humor and a sore tailbone.
One thing to be said about Archie, he enjoyed having kids around no matter what he was doing. Once he was working in a field pitchforking hay onto a horse drawn wagon. As usual, his boys, myself and maybe a another neighborhood boy or two, were riding atop the hay. Loose hay does not make a compact load like baled hay. It is more like a ship rolling at sea swaying left to right. I could see that on the hill we were crossing, on reaching the end of the field, Archie would have to turn the wagon just as the hillside got steeper. The scene I could clearly see in my young mind was of the wagon tipping over, capsizing so to speak, the horses would bolt and race away at a gallop, dragging the wagon behind, probably all the way to the barn. Anticipating this scene of destruction, I had my escape plan in place. As the wagon and hay went over I would jump clear and roll down hill to keep clear.
Sure enough, a minute later, just as imagined, the wagon tipped over, I jumped as planned and the horses just stopped amid a tangle of harness. It is a good thing draught horses, for all their size generally mild mannered creatures. The same cannot be said for Archie. I could hear him hollering which provided us boys the opportunity to expand out vocabulary. To this day my boyhood assesment of 70 years ago still holds. That Archie was a character alright.