Buck Tyler Ag Teacher

by Mickey Burris of Eastover, SC

We moved to Allendale, South Carolina into a new house just a few days before I began the tenth grade in 1952. Previously a tourist stop on highway 301 between Florida and Maine, Allendale boomed then as a residential community for families of workers constructing the Savannah River Plant, referred to as “the bomb plant.”

I fell in love with the town because hunting and farm lands lay just a half mile past the city limits and only a narrow broom straw field lay between our house and the school’s back door. On opening day, I crossed the field to the front entrance and signed up for classes. The sudden influx of construction families doubled student enrollment, which added fun and excitement to the town and school.

Being a city boy who yearned to live in the country, I signed up for agriculture class. This allowed me to join Future Farmers of America and sat me in Mr. Buck Tyler’s class. His was not a tenth grade curriculum but a cross-section of about ten rawboned boys from ninth to twelve grades. All reared in Allendale, some had taken “ag” several years. Farming which had only been my dream was their life.

Mr. Tyler’s first order of business assigned or allowed students to choose a project for the year. I believe the others expected this because as Mr. Tyler called each name the students described projects ranging from raising a shoat, fattening a calf, growing sweet potatoes, raising winter wheat, erecting a prefabricated metal corn crib… to, “I don‘t know.”

Buck Tylers blue eyes stared dead into mine. “Why don’t you know?”

I pointed out the window. He could clearly see my home across the field sitting on the corner of a dirt side road and the paved street to Swallow Savannah Cemetery. “I live over there and don’t have room for a project.”

He walked to the window and peered out, turned and said, “I’ll think about it.”

I left school that day thinking I had slid by again. I say again because we had moved around following construction and I had learned how to avoid work and responsibility by cultivating pity, a new and ignorant lad in town. After school the next day I spotted Mr. Tyler coming through the broom straw, his red hair glistening in the autumn sun. Over his shoulder he carried a pitiless grub hoe, an unsympathetic ax and a domineering shovel. I met him on the back steps. He leaned the tools against the house and said, “You can plant centipede.”

My first time hearing the word, centipede, “I don’t know how.” I studied the working ends of the tools propped menacingly nearby.

“Come on, I’ll show you.” He walked around to the front yard. I trudged behind. We stopped at the corner where the two roads met. He waived his arm horizontally in a semi-circle like he was blessing the plum thicket and said, “Dig these up. Let me know when you finish.” As he headed back toward the school he stopped and said, “Take care of my tools.”

“Yes sir,” I yelled over the broom straw and glanced again, dreading the instruments, already ruining my afternoons.

At school several days later Mr. Tyler loaded the nine of us into a school bus and drove to a farm. We walked through a pasture accompanied by the farmer who explained to Mr. Tyler, “I found her when I noticed what looked like a buzzard fight. The calf’s hind portion was hanging out. Had to’ve been dead several days ’cause they were trying to get at it.”

When we reached the cow, I was relieved there was nothing hanging. Mr. Tyler removed his shirt. The cow stood with drooped head slung low, not even swishing her tail to ward off the fly swarms. I think she was too sick to swish. Mr. Tyler rammed his arm clear to his shoulder, out of sight, up the cow’s birth canal and began dragging out hunks of dead calf. I almost upchucked from the smell alone, and I stood fifteen feet away. I wondered how he tolerated the odor and sight of the rotten calf so cheerfully. He worked joking. “Any you boys want to get some hands-in-training? Give you an A.” A farm boy volunteered. Mr. Tyler said, “Just kidding. Better not. You could get hurt, but you get an A for trying.” After the cow was empty, he shoved a garden hose about five feet in her and flushed her with disinfectant. He washed with soap and water and poured some chemical on his arm. We loaded and returned to school before our next class.

During the ride back, I pondered, how the students referred to him as, “Mr. Buck,” unlike some teachers I had known who were unknowingly called disrespectful nicknames. What Mr. Tyler had just performed made an everlasting impression. He didn’t have to help the farmer or the cow. He taught school, not practiced veterinary medicine, but forty miles from Augusta, if you cut through the bomb plant, he was Allendale County’s closest thing to a vet. Mr. Buck was a helpful man and I believe he felt sorry for the farmer, and we all felt sorry for the cow. In that hour he showed, taught us, indelibly, without mentioning a word, the importance of taking good care of your animals and helping your neighbor. Mr. Tyler provided a strong, positive example for us boys, and we affectionately called him Mr. Buck. He later told the class the cow recovered.

It took me thirty days of chopping and grubbing before I dragged the last plum bush into the field next door. Mr. Tyler returned carrying a ball of masonry twine and a burlap sack full of grass. He told me to wet the bag every day and store it in the shade. This was easy. We walked to the front yard.

He kneeled down at the corner of our lot, tied one end of the twine to a sixteen penny nail and stuck the nail in the ground. He stretched the cord to the opposite property boundary and anchored the line with another nail. He looked up at me and said, “Get the ax.”

I lit out around the house and ran back with it. He chopped several holes about a foot apart along the string line, pulled some sprigs of centipede from the sack, placed them in the chopped holes and stepped on them, mashing the dirt around the sprigs, leaving only the tip protruding from the earth. He handed me the ax and said, “Plant the sprigs about this far apart,” and held his hands out to indicate the distance. “When you reach the end move the string twelve inches. Repeat the spacing until the yard is completely sprigged. If you need more grass let me know. I want to inspect when you finish.”

I did as he said for a day or two, but my ax-chops grew further apart and the string moved wider and wider every relocation. When he inspected, just before Thanksgiving, I only had to put the string down between three rows which were too wide. Also, he marked about fifty places with his heel where sprigs were too far apart. As he left, he said, “Good job. In a year or two your yard will have a thick carpet of centipede.”

I guess he was right. We moved when school closed for summer, but thirty years later I rode by and it looked as he had predicted. I have never forgotten Mr. Buck and how he taught meeting responsibilities, and diligently doing any job. I also never forgot milk cow is spelled milch cow.