When I was a young boy on the farm we had a welder. My father used a fairly primitive one to patch things together, usually using a foot powered forge and charcoal to melt, then pound, the metal back together. Electric welders became relatively cheap when I was young owing to their practicality and popularity.

In fact, after my father's death when I was 12, we bought a Lincoln arc welder for $225, which was the same price I paid for my own welder twenty years later.

For a poor farmer, a welder is essential to repair vital machinery. Since we were always competing with the weather, time was critical. We had to keep the machinery on the move. Our machinery was old and always breaking down, requiring a trip in from the field to the welding shop, time to weld back some severed part and then the trip back to the field.

I once got a stone in the old International Harvester square hay baler and the entire casting that houses the huge plunger arm broke into two pieces. I disassembled it and hauled it to old Ike Liktieg, our local blacksmith, who just cursed and said it was useless. I would have to buy a new casting he said and that cost more than the used baler that we had purchased at a farm sale.

Determined to salvage the baler, I set to work with the arc welder, using nickel rod appropriate for cast iron. I had been warned that you could not weld for long periods in one place because cast iron has a tendency to chip off if it cools too fast so the secret to welding it was to not get it too hot.

Each morning before I headed off to my day job on the loading dock moving freight, I welded for 15 minutes and again each evening. Assuming the big crack would be weak, I welded malleable steel straps around the huge gear box anywhere there was a flat surface. When I finished the work a couple of weeks later it looked like a real mess and my older brother insisted that it would fall apart the first time it was used.

Finally the day came to take the reassembled baler out to the field for a test. There was always a field of hay to mow, rake and bale. I headed down the first windrow after a few fervent prayers.

Well, actually, the praying went on for quite a while as I made first one round, then another, always expecting to hear a thunderous crash as the huge plunger bashed against the hay and severed my precious weld. Two hours later, with the whole field baled, I drove proudly back to barn and crawled under the baler to inspect. Aside from a bit of gear lube lost from the somewhat porous weld, it looked no worse for the wear. The same baler continued working for years.

Making hay was an essential part of every farm boy's summer life and it was especially true on our hilly farm, better suited to a dairy herd than for row crop agriculture.

There was always work in the hayfields in the summer for a strong boy who could get as much as a dollar an hour. The bigger boys, who were able to throw bales to the top of the rack, worked on the ground, usually shirtless and without gloves.

The smaller boys either drove the tractor down the row of bales or worked on the top of the rack to drag the bales around and stack them.

Those were tough hard times but I always think back and smile when I think about that old baler and how I defied the experts and welded it together.

Dr. Thomas B. Croat has worked at the Missouri Botanical Garden for 46 years and is now the P.A. Schulze Curator of Botany. His work has taken him to 65 countries and he has collected plants on all continents except Antarctica. His specialty is the Philodendron family and he has discovered about 1,000 new species among the more than 103,000 collections he has prepared. He lives on seven acres near Pacific in a home he designed and built himself. He and his wife, Patricia, have two children and five grandchildren in the St. Louis area.