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MechAg94 wrote: We did this in my Grandpa's hay barn. Set up a "club house" sort of thing. All went well until my cousin's sister told on us.

jimlongley wrote: Threatening thread drift - After hauling the wagon all afternoon, Old Mr. King would pull the truck right through the barn, and Mike, Mike, Paul, and I would stack the bales. Mike, Mike, and I were all pretty big kids, but Paul was pretty small, so we put him on top to stack while we tossed. The first year that Paul worked with us, he didn't know to "dutch" the bales and the result was that the top got pretty unstable. Suddenly Mike and I swung and tossed a bale, and it came back down. We started yelling for Paul, and finally climbed up to see what was going on. Paul had stepped into one of the cracks he created and slid down several courses and was unable to climb back up, and couldn't make enough noise to let us know what was going on.

We had to tear down and rebuild or Mr. King wouldn't pay us.

jimlongley wrote:OTOH, when I worked on the farm, it wasn't uncommon for the driver to rope the wheel, get out, and toss a few bales on the wagon with us kids.

Or, for that matter, for one of us kids to drive the truck. I was too short to reach the pedals and could just barely see over the dash, but the truck had a throttle on the dash and you could just set it at whatever speed and just steer. The steering wheel was HUGE compared to modern ones, no power steering, and it stayed pointed straight ahead very easily. We would get to the end of the row and old Mr. King would jump down and turn the truck around to line up with the next row, while the kid jumped back on the wagon, and then he would calmly walk back and jump on the wagon himself and then tell one of the kids to go "take a rest."