Theodore Bikel Quotes

I plowed fields with horses and worked as a hired hand in high school for 50 cents a day.

I was a hard-workin' little boy. Oh, I worked. Pullin' cotton, shockin' grain, cuttin' wheat, loadin' wheat, choppin' cotton, cleanin' chicken houses, milkin' cows, plowin'.

Even though I hated doing farming and wanted to just get out of the village, I would work from 5 in the morning till 5 in the evening.

I've worked the ranch. I've hauled sugar beets from the field.

To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old.

I worked on a farm for a little bit.

The strength that I have comes from irrigating the citrus plantation, ploughing in the vineyard, guarding the melon fields at night. I believe that's what gave me the strength.

I grew up working on farms. You'd do anything for money. You'd pick blueberries in the summertime for weeks; you'd cut down, like, spruce and fir trees for pulp.

The greatest job I ever had was working on my family farm. Each morning my father would come into my bedroom around 4:30 am and command me to get up and work the fields. I would spend the next two hours before school slopping pigs and cropping tobacco.

We keep horses. I have to keep working.

Sometimes we followed the crops, doing migrant labor. We did several years of tenant farming in Western Oregon starting in the early '50s. Later, my stepdad managed gas stations in a small town near Portland.

I used to work a lot on ranches where I grew up, and I had to rise at 5:30 in the morning.

My stepdad was a farmer, so growing up, during summer breaks, I woke up every morning and went to work. Harvesting tobacco, picking cucumbers, gathering watermelons from the patch, pulling up sweet potatoes... stuff like that.

It is a rule of nature that taking a day off on the farm sets a person back at least a week.

I was raised to farm work.

Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that my own hands, all of my life, I put in the plant beds and transferred it! I hoed it! I've dug in it! I've sprayed it! I've chopped it! I've shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it!

I was influenced a lot by those around me - there was a lot of singing that went on in the cotton fields.

I developed my style by pickin' a lot of cotton, plowin' that ole mule every day. I just got the rhythm, and any rhythm I need I know where it is; I know where to find it.

As I grew older, farms in Kentucky provided me with many jobs in hauling hay and in cutting tobacco. In addition to helping fund my college years, these jobs helped me to meet an array of very interesting and amazing men and women.

Well, I can do certain jobs because smells don't bother me. But that means I'm usually the one at the ranch cleaning up all the manure.

It's better not to work than to work in something you don't want to be working in.

My days are spent wrangling children, chipping dried manure from boots, washing jeans, and frying calf nuts.

I've always considered myself a physical person. I don't call myself a farm girl, but I did spend a lot of years shoveling manure and throwing hay, because I worked to pay most of my riding expenses.

My grandparents back in Kentucky owned a tobacco farm. So, to make money in the summer, we could cut and chop and top and house and strip the tobacco.

Oh, I started out young. They handed me a cotton sack when I was about 8 years old. Give me a little small one, tell me to fill it up. I never did like the farm but I was out there with my grandmother, didn't want to get away from around her too far.