All of this rain we’ve had has me thinking about the wheat harvest.

Is it still the same as it was in the 1970s and 80s when high school and college-age farm kids knew they’d be home at harvest to help their dad, grandpa or uncle at harvest?

Wheat harvest was all new to this City Girl in my late 30s when we moved to Hennessey in 1978 to get the newspaper out. All these years later I can still remember writing about the “wheat heading out,” or maybe it was “booting,” and there were those awful “armyworms.”

I also remember Doyle Jones out west of town letting me drive his combine. I just did it for one row before he said that was enough. That was OK with me because there was no air-conditioning, and besides, Doyle was getting antsy about finishing that field.

Co-op managers who were knee-deep in their jobs were usually helpful in giving me quotes during our first couple of years. That was when my husband, Bill, had to keep his paying job with the state. Once we could pay him I just had to remember to get the closing wheat prices in the paper.

Those memories, and this time of the year, sent me to the Hennessey library’s site of those old papers to look at his stories.

In the July 5, 1984 newspaper the wheat harvest was history, and had closed July 3 at $3.34 a bushel.

The Hennessey Farmer’s Elevator and Co-op had taken in “760,000 bushels, and the overall quality was good.” Bill also quoted then-Manager Leroy Fuksa that they’d shipped out 350,000 bushels, “about 100 rail cars, and approximately 25,000 bushels by truck. “We’re still loading wheat. We’ve sold about 160,000 bushels and we’re pretty full. I understand that Union Equity in Enid isn’t accepting any more wheat on a storage basis — it all has to be cash,” Fuksa was quoted as saying.

He said wheat prices went up about five cents, but went back down. “I understand Russia bought some wheat last week,” he said.

The June 18, 1994 issue story shows the wheat price was $2.55 as of June 16: “Low test weights seemed to be standard, according to various co-op managers.”

Hennessey had received “about 300,000 bushels by June 13, and averaged a 56-pound-per bushel test weight on all of it, and harvest was about 60% finished in the local area.”

Fuksa also said “the better yields seemed to be coming from the hard land east of town, and the sand land west of town seemed to be producing the lower yields.” He said it appeared to be a bigger difference than in normal years.

“Rick Weathers, manager at the Bison Co-op said they’d received about 420,000 bushels of grain, and estimated farmers in his area were about 60% finished with test weights “probably going to average about 56 pounds.” He said they had only a few loads that tested 60 pounds, and cheat hadn’t been a big problem except for two or three producers.”

Today I have no idea what the price of wheat is going for now, but then again it seems just like yesterday when Doyle let me drive his combine. I also recall that Bill took pictures of Doyle water skiing on one of his flooded fields back then.

However, some of the best harvest stories are the ones about when neighbors stepped up and harvested a neighbor’s fields when they were unable to do it for themselves. Now that’s the Oklahoma, and Kingfisher County, standard for sure.