Experience the wild roller coaster ride of a double addiction. It did not involve drugs, alcohol, or any of the other usual suspects, but an addiction to the very unusual combination of composting and farming. It started at a very young age and has lasted over forty years without interruption. Because of the addiction, my health, my family, and my well being never got in the way. It will be a great treat to meet all the wonderful mentors and roll models that was my great pleasure to work with and interact with. These people were all movers and shakers, they were all innovators, and they were all on the cutting edge. They could all handle a tense situation very smoothly whenever it arose, and all should have a book written about each of them. You will get a very close look at what it takes to compost and farm in a big time arena. What it takes as far as machinery, manpower, management, money, and the part mother nature plays in all of this. I could not have been born at a better time or in a better place. An exciting autobiography about a wonderful career and a cast of individuals that I would not trade for anything. They all allowed me to be green was green wasn't cool, and most importantly, to be compost when compost wasn't cool. I Was Compost When Compost Wasn't Cool My Forty Years of Trials, Tribulations, Failures, Successes, Mentors, and Memories in the Business of Composting and Farming By Stevan A. (Coach) Brockman AuthorHouse Copyright © 2010 Stevan A. (Coach) Brockman All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4520-4922-9 Contents Forward........................................................3Introduction...................................................5The Early Years................................................13Hay, Campbell Soup, And College................................25Family Growers And Campbell Soup...............................39Death, Farming, And The Ladies.................................51Compost Products; Birth And Death..............................61Life After The Mushroom........................................77Machinery, Innovation, And Imagination.........................97More Machinery And More Memories...............................111More People And More Problems..................................125Stable Bedding And Customers...................................137My Next Forty Years............................................145Acknowledgments; My List Of Most Respected.....................153 Chapter One The Early Years My two brothers and I all started out at about age seven or eight working for the local Greek truck farmers. There was about ten or twelve families around the Joliet area that produced a lot of fresh vegetables in the summer and "trucked" them to the Water Street Market in Chicago for sale. There were also a lot of summer jobs for kids that wanted to work. We would weed onions, pick green and yellow beans, pick lettuce, endive, asparagus, kohlrabi, beets, turnips, and tomatoes most of the time on our hands and knees. We would reap a solid thirty five to forty cents per hour. Not bad for the late fifties and I think this is where the government got the idea for minimum wage in this country. My oldest brother got a job with Caterpillar in Joliet after he finished high school. Not long after he got hired, he was drafted by the army for a two year tour of duty that landed him mainly in Germany. When he came back, he went straight back to his same job at Caterpillar that he had left two years earlier. He also got involved with restoring old Chevy cars and has a collection of vintage automobiles who's value is doing much better than my stock market portfolio. He retired when he was only fifty two and he and his wife enjoy traveling and working with all his old cars. My middle brother worked for the local ammunition plant making bombs after high school. After a few years there, he enlisted in the army for three years stationed in France for most of the time. After he came home, he got married and settled about twenty miles south of Joliet working at about four or five different jobs in the area. When the government decided to build the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery near Elwood, Illinois, my brother was the first to be hired and the first to be fired. At this cemetery, when a single body is buried, the hole is dug about six foot deep. After digging, the operator jumps into the hole to square the corners up so the coffin will fit just right. When there is going to be two buried in the same hole, the operator digs down nine feet, places a protective devise around the hole so the dirt walls will not cave in on him or her when squaring the corners up. He was digging one of these deep holes and the boss came by and said, "there was not enough time to get and use one of the protective devises". My brother would not enter the hole without it, and got fired. He tried to appeal his dismissal to a local politician, but never got any