Straw Piles and G Men

401 Burwash Apt. 313,Savoy, Illinois 61874

I believe straw piles have been mentioned in the magazine
before, but here is an amusing one.

During World War I there were men circulating in the community
and they were called ‘G Men’. They checked on food
rationing, sold Victory Bonds and since there was an area west of
us a few miles where quite a few German people had settled, they
seemed to keep an eye on those people. I never recall of any bad
incidents, however.

The G man who had an encounter with my dad checked one of his
freshly thrashed wheat straw stacks. He seemed to think there was
sufficient grain in it to require thrashing over. This required
getting a group of men together, to move the thrasher in and
proceed with the orders.

You can imagine the job, pulling the thrasher up to the pile of
straw and moving it all of the distance to the thrasher feed, even
though they reset the machine a time or two.

The amusing part of the whole story is that they re-thrashed the
entire stack and got about two inches of wheat in the bottom of one
grain wagon. That is what I said, two inches of grain in the entire
wagon!