How about those salaries for professional athletes and big-time college coaches?

I read that former professional basketball player Shaquille O’Neal owns 44 automobiles. No one on this planet needs 44 cars.

Kentuckians were paying NCAA basketball coach Rick Pitino $7.7 million a year until he was fired recently for constantly cheating in what many described as the Mafia-like world of big time collegiate basketball where money rules.     

In nearly every state, the highest paid public employee isn’t the governor or a really talented English teacher or a dedicated math teacher. It’s a coach.

This year, Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh is making $9 million a year. Money talks in the NCAA.

Hearing of such sporting ridiculousnesses, I harken back to my growing-up years during the Great Depression.

My dad made $4 for a 10-hour working day at the grain elevator in Wessington Springs. To make a little more, for a few weeks he signed on with a traveling combine crew in Kansas and worked its way north.

To tide us over while he was absent, he bought a grumpy old goat that was our family’s milk supply.

That critter spent the rest of the late summer and early fall at the end of a frayed rope in our backyard that was mostly clear of vegetation because of the devastating drought and those darned dust storms.

Dad was 35 years old at the time and had an eighth-grade education. He and my mother had tried farming but got beat up badly when hog cholera decimated their entire hog house.

Throughout their lives, what money they made was the “hard-earned” variety.

My mother, who was a schoolteacher, didn’t work because there were no teaching jobs. She made a little money for a few weeks before Thanksgiving when the Springs co-op creamery set up a turkey picking operation under a flapping tarp in the alley behind the creamery.

The co-op hired local women to do the work. The ladies stood knee deep in damp turkey feathers and picked and cleaned the birds for the evening train bound for the Chicago market.

While my dad was out on the threshing crew, I spent a little part of each day with a death-grip on that frayed rope while my mother milked our grumpy goat.

Looking back, for much of my childhood we lived off a few dollars a week from the elevator job, the extra earned on the threshing trip north and mom’s hard-earned turkey picking money.

We had fresh goat’s milk and as an occasional treat, some dried, shriveled apples we got after standing in the welfare line down at the Jerauld County courthouse.

All that we had was most certainly hard earned.

My father died first. Ten year later my mother passed on.

Their entire estate amounted to less than $10,000, all of it very hard earned.

They never dreamed someone would make millions of dollars a year, or own 44 cars.

I suggest that those who live in that world should be required to spend a few days each year holding a frayed rope attached to a smelly old goat. 

If you’d like to comment, email the author at cfcecil@swiftel.net.