5 Generations

 Grandpa Freitas and his great-grand kids..

My grandpa was a cotton farmer in the valley, as was his father before him. Grandpa went to high school, then went to college for 2 weeks before a neighbor offered to let him farm 20 acres. Grandpa quit school and took on farming. I remember getting up at the break of dawn and riding in his old Toyota that smelled of pure farm dirt. We would speed along the rutted dirt roads that lined the edges of the crops. listening to old-time country and talk radio as he did the rounds to his different plots of land, checking the water, turning pumps on and off, shoveling canals...He did this day in and day out during the growing season.

This trip I got the opportunity to ask grandpa about some old photographs. Here are a few...

 My grandpa in High School is the one on the right, and the girl under his arm was a girlfriend at the time. (He seemed to have a lot of pictures of him and different ladies...he was quite good looking, and still is ; )

 

 This is my grandpa on the first cotton picker he ever bought.
If you look closely, you can see that this cotton picker has two prongs in the front. It picks one row at a time. Later my grandpa purchased a two-row picker...

 This is my great Grandpa, George Freitas, on the right. They are showing off elk horns. Hunting lives on in our family to this day. My grandpa hunted and my Uncle and cousins still do. There are 5 Generations between George Freitas, and my kids.

 This is a (partial) picture of the very first twenty acres that my grandpa farmed after High School. The small pink house in the distance, where the furrow ends, is one of the houses that my grandpa grew up in ( his childhood house was on this property as well, just about 100 feet away. It was in poor condition and had to be torn down a long time ago). My great Grandma Maime Freitas continued to live here after George Freitas passed away and I have memories of picking and canning apricots, peaches and making pies in her kitchen.