Folklore: Pinky Butler, when a load of hay passes you, make a wish, sympathetic magic

Folklore: When you pass a load of moving hay, make a wish.
Genre: superstition, sympathetic magic; plant husbandry: Appalachia, possibly British origins.
Bonus folklore: family history, a moniker, and a diamond ring
Informant: Donna Champion, female, 64
English/Spanish-speaking Guamanian-Chamorro, Guatemalan, Spanish, French/Norman Irish-American
ESL instructor, Sonoma County, CA
Dec. 9, 2018
Collected in Cotati, CA (in a car on Hwy 116)

I collected a new bit of folklore that arrived by way of Guam, of all places. It probably arrived by way of Texas, possibly originally from Kentucky, or even the British Isles, ca. 1910. The saying was a favorite of Donna Champion's grandfather, Chester Carl, aka "CC," or “Pinky” Butler, who passed it onto his Guamanian daughter, Clara Mae Butler.

Donna and I were driving down Highway 116, when an overladen hay truck was approaching us, coming the other way. She said, Quick! Make a wish. So I did. Then she told me the superstition that her mother, Pinky’s daughter, Clara Mae Butler Champion, who was born on Guam, taught her. Donna said, "Whenever we passed a hay truck, my mother would say: when you pass a load of moving hay, make a wish. It didn't have to be a truck." She also said, "You need to keep the wish to yourself."

I got a few bits of folklore for the price of one, from how the Coca-Cola franchise arrived on Guam, to how Pinky got his Guamanian moniker. Chester Carl, aka C.C. (b. In Sunset, TX, ca., 1884), was a redhead of Norman-Irish descent (by way of Illinois, and W. Virginia); his father, James Berry Butler, a newspaper editor from Illinois, took to drink after Chester’s mother, Melissa Belle Payne, a Baptist who hailed from Rockwell Texas, died in childbirth when he was eight years old).

Living with his three brothers at the relatives didn't pan out, and after Chester finished eighth grade, he ran away from his mother’s extended family. When he was 14, he went to seek his fortune out west. He arrived San Francisco, where he was employed to sell fruits vegetables in a pushcart on Nob Hill. His employer took him in and gave him room and board. When Chester was 18 (ca. 1902), he joined the Navy, and served aboard the USS Pensacola. That's how he wound up on Guam.

Chester "Pinky" Butler of the USS Pensacola, showing off his tats

A fair-freckled, blue-eyed redhead, Chester's fair complexion didn’t fare too well on Guam, he was always sunburned—hence the moniker "Pinky." With the help of his greengrocer savings, which he had converted into a diamond ring he kept hidden in his pillow, he used the ring as collateral, and with that, made a family fortune. Pinky was industrious, he brought a Coke franchise, and seltzer water machines to Guam, and sold American made goods to the Pacific islands. That enterprise became a thriving chain of businesses, Butler's Inc. 

That grubstake ring became an engagement ring for the 17-year-old Ignacia Bordallo, who was from the large Kotla Chamorro clan. They were married on the 8th of January, 1915, in Agat, Guam. They had six children. He was taken a prisoner of war Dec. 8, 1941, and held in Kobe, Japan for the duration of the war. His health was broken. He died on Valentine's Day, 1952, in Oakland, CA. Donna's eldest sister, Connie still has that diamond ring.

The first time my friend Donna remembered hearing the saying, When you pass a load of moving hay, make a wish, was in the early 1960s, was when she was a child. Donna learned it from her mother, Clara Mae (Pinky’s daughter), in Sebastopol, CA. 

What makes this bit of folklore interesting to me is that there were no hay trucks or haywains on Guam, and yet the saying survived three generations. Donna's brother Greg, born in 1952, didn't recall the hay saying, but he did add that his maternal great-great-grandfather, from Spain, raised cattle on Guam.

Apparently the second part of the hay-wish formula was that you couldn’t look back at the passing vehicle either, a condition which my friend said she never learned. I found another account online where you had to lick your thumbs, and snap your fingers/slap your thigh, too. (see my notes below.)

MOMMAE

          Clara Mae Butler Champion
          January 18, 1919—Sept. 12, 2010

I'm a little distracted, a dear friend's mother died.
We're caught in the logistics of today & tomorrow.
When I was homeless, living in my car,
I was adopted into her clan, haole warts and all.
From her, I learned old island traditions
& the parties where everybody is always welcome,
the interdependence of things: inafmao'lek
& manamko—reverence for the elderly.

I loved the carved storyboards of the ancient ones,
of taotaomo'na—the twins, Puntan & Fu'uña who,
before there was space & time, made the world.
Fu'uña used Puntan's eyes for the sun & moon,
she painted his brow into long rainbows,
then she became stone, she became Guam:
from red earth & water, she made the Laso de Fua,
the stone that became the children of the world.

They say it took a giant net woven of women's hair
to trap the great fish the men couldn't catch.
Mommae was the fish & the net, she was the rock
of Guam that holds her family together.

I remember how scandalized Mommae was
when I wore a Chamorro cut-lace underslip
as a dress. Gai’ase´nu guaho. But I wore it
until nothing was left but a curtain of memory.

We will take Mommae out in style
with music & food: red rice, keliguin, mango
& bilimbines—shining starfruit of the isles.
For the word Guam—Guåhan—means "to have."
As in the Irish, go leor: "plenty" & "enough."
We have everything we need in our hearts.
Right to the end, Mommae taught us the Chamorro words.
It was like my grandmother saying: Don't let your language
slip through your fingers to be lost forever.

We will say Håfa Adai. We will eat roast pig & taro.
We will give Mommae a real Chamorro sendoff—
so like an Irish wake. We will sing in church,
we will sing at graveside and we will lift our voices
up through the rainbowed vale of tears.
The Irish nuns and priest will sing praise, her son
Greg will sing all the old songs, "Till we meet again."
Fanatåtte. Esta ågupa'. Esta ågupa' Mommae.