What’s the big deal with the redneck jokes these days? Where I grew up, a “redneck” was just a person with an uneven suntan. Only his neck was red, because a hat protected his head and his shirt collar was snugged-up to exclude the dust and chaff.

Now we have a different class of people with uneven tans, and these aren’t even rednecks. These are the young and handsome – who have been lying around in tanning booths.

These people want to look tan without having to chop wood or sit on a tractor all day, the way folks used to get their suntans. They seem to forget a good, honest tan can only be acquired through good honest work (or fishing).

When I was a boy we got a tan by driving tractors. If I had been a girl it might have been different, but many of them got tan driving tractors the same as the boys did. We boys would just yank off our shirts in the spring, and in a few days we were tan.

The girls had to be a little more careful, but those who were assigned to driving tractors would stand up and drive backwards if they thought it would improve their tans. They were hard on fences, sometimes.

Once in a while we would see a kid at school who had been out in the woods shelling walnuts. These kids would come in with a pretty good tan, right in the middle of the winter!
It was hard to get the stain on evenly, and those who tried it looked like a piece of badly finished furniture. When we got tan it was pure sunshine, none of this artificial light or fancy tanning lotion.

Maybe I should take that back: Our tans were mostly sun, but extraneous substances were involved, too. There were other substances in the outdoor tans, but these were incidental materials rather than lotions. A boy caught out in the field smearing on suntan lotion would have been laughed out of the country.
Things like dust and oil, bearing grease or horse sweat would enhance a tan, but everyone saw these as natural substances. Besides, these were accidental applications, not some type of lotion.

The best suntans I ever had came from driving my brother’s old John Deere B. This was one of those two-cylinder tractors, fondly called Johnny Poppers. You could hear these tractors for miles around: Ker-pow, pow, pow-pow-pow

My brother’s old B had a problem with some cylinder rings and got into the habit of spraying small drops of unburned gasoline and oil out the exhaust. Every “pow” contained a few drops of lubricant.
Some readers may remember that the exhaust on the old B was above the engine, directly in front of the driver. Those tractors
didn’t have cabs like the modern machines do, either – after a full
day of tractor-driving a kid would come in from the field pretty well-
oiled.

A guy could take off his shirt with full confidence that several hours from now he would be brown as a berry. Along with the sunshine, the oil and gasoline mist produced one of the deepest, smoothest tans you would ever want to see.

There was no embarrassment with this type of tan, either. It wasn’t like today, where we have people sneaking into a tanning booth and trying to slip out the back door so the people at the coffee shop won’t see them leave.

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.