Jay Hulse’s tobacco plants recall Tennessee farm youth

A simpler time calls to Jay Hulse from the three massive tobacco plants that tower over his porch in Colfax.

Hot summer mornings in Tennessee, working on his father’s tobacco farm in the early 1940s; these are the memories Hulse recalls when he tends his three fully-grown plants.

The five to six foot high plants with their wide green leaves and straight stalks stand out on his porch. Flowers shaped like delicate pink trumpets blossom at the top of the tallest plant.

“It just brings back memories from the old days,” he said.

Hulse, 75, whose real name is Jim, has smoked for 65 years, but says he will not be smoking these plants. Due to his smoking, Hulse has endured three open heart surgeries.

He is giving two tobacco plants to Gary Ackerman of Colfax.

Hulse was born in Tennessee and worked his father’s tobacco farm for the first 10 years of his life. It was hard labor for a boy of eight years old, but Hulse maintains he never viewed his time on the farm negatively.

That expertise may be why these plants turned out so well. He started them last March after a friend asked him if tobacco could be grown in the colder northwest climate.

He ordered some seed from Tennessee and planted them. He knows of only two others who have tried the plant on the Palouse, but of the three, only Hulse’s plants reached maturity. Two of the three are now over his head.

From start to finish, he can recite how tobacco was grown in the 1940s. They planted the seeds, let them mature to seedlings, then transplanted them out to the open field. Transplanting was his assigned job as a boy.

The plants typically grew six to seven feet high when they were harvested, by hand, with a special “tobacco stick” that removed the leaves. Then, Hulse said, they moved all their leaves into a tobacco barn to dry, packaged them in crates and shipped them off for sale.

America was just emerging from the Great Depression during his childhood years on the farm in Tennessee. They grew tobacco, wheat, barley and corn. His father earned $12 every two weeks as a policeman, in addition to the occasional earnings of the farm.

Hulse worked the crops with his four sisters and one brother.

“We all was out in the fields,” he said. “That was the way of life back then. It was still a depression in ’45 in Tennessee.”

Then his father’s sister contacted them from Steptoe in 1945 to report the economy and jobs were much more plentiful in this area.

“They were making $8 a day out here,” he said. “We all came out on the Greyhound bus.”

It took the Hulse family four days and three nights to make the life-changing journey from Tennessee to Steptoe. His father found a job on a farm and later worked for a construction company. He and his five siblings were relieved of farm labor.

Hulse and his wife of 42 years, Dorothy, have eight children, nine great-grandchildren, and 14 great-grandchildren.

Hulse doesn’t complain about the hard days he worked on the farm when he was a child.

“I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything in the world,” he said.

He believes hard work should be a bastion for the raising of all youth, in every generation.

“I think now days children should have to experience that,” he said.