I’m about 6 years younger than you but can relate to your cotton field experiences right down to the 50¢ an hour 10 hour days and $3.00 per hundred for picking. We got out of school for picking season too.
Where our stories differ is that after high school, I enlisted. There weren’t a whole lot of options for college back then, no student loans, no Pell grants for poor cotton pickers.Work at something or go hungry.
I quit school after the eighth grade and went to work full time, My Mother signed and I enlisted in the army when I turned 17. E-1 private’s pay was 69 bucks a month and made out 50 dollars a month allotment to my Mother.
When I got out was twenty, came home, married, we left and never looked back to that G_D forsaken place. One thing I can say,is that early root wild hog or die life taught Wife and I the value of a work ethic and a dollar.