My neighbors (now in their eighties) still have a picture of me and their daughter the night I took her to the Homecoming Dance (1969.) Haying had ended just a couple weeks before and I look like a 120 lb scarecrow in a blazer that hangs off me.
It usually took till the following June to get back up to 160 lbs.. Man, that was hard work.
You betcha. The other guys who did hard work were the short, stocky guys who humped feed sacks at the grain mills.
One time I was at a rural electric co-op and was demonstrating a machine that weighed about 600 pounds. When it came time to put it back in the truck, two workers volunteered to do it since I was obviously a little small. They damn near threw it through the front of the truck. BIG BUCKS they were. Wasn’t nothing but a thing, as we say.