Retirees Found New Life As Bench Gang

Retirees Found New Life As Bench Gang AG WORLD Ag World 18-1-21 In our small town of Hudson, North Carolina, there isn't much excitement on main street except watching cars go by. But that was enough to give birth to a group of retirees with some time on their hands but the desire to still keep busy in a useful way. It all started when a couple of retired residents rigged up a makeshift seat in front of the hardware store to sit, talk and watch the traffic. Soon others joined them. As the group grew larger, someone donated nice benches for them to use in summer and a local merchant provided an empty house where they could gather in winter. Soon everyone was referring to the loosely organized group as the "Bench Gang". Most of the 25 or so members of the Bench Gang are local people who have known each other from childhood or worked together in local factories or businesses over the years. A few years ago, someone in the Gang suggested they plant a big garden and donate the produce to the needy. There is a small field behind the Bench Gang's winter house, and the man who owned it let them use it for the new project. The garden worked out so well they've since expanded using more donated acres, tractors and equipment, and selling enough produce to help the poor and also to set up a scholarship at a local community college. A winter project developed when local residents started donating black walnuts to they Gang. At first they cracked the nuts and had their wives bake them into cakes. As the amount of nuts grew, they started selling the surplus at the local hardware store and donating the proceeds to a local Hospice. 'Ilse fall of 1993 produced such a bumper crop of black walnuts, the Gang ended up with over 100 bushels of nuts which they were able to store in a local furniture shop's warehouse. Then they had to come up with a way to crack them open for sale. Black walnuts have a hard outer shell that's difficult to remove. At first they laid the nuts in a driveway and drove over them with a small tractor, but then we read about a home-built machine in FARM SHOW Magazine that does the hulling automatically. I built a prototype for the group, and it worked so well, we took it to a fabricating shop which put together a quality-built unit that does a great job. Now the Bench Gang is looking for an automated way to separate the inner shells from the meat since at present they're doing it the old fashioned way by hand. We'd like to hear from any readers who might have a better way. We'd also like to know if anyone knows of a market for the shells of black walnuts. Contact FARM SHOW Followup, G.C. Glover, 116 Glover Acres, Lenoir, N.C. 28645 (ph 704 728-3175).

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