Nick Offerman

Nick, you were born in the little town of Minooka, Illinois.

Did I pronounce that correctly?

Minooka.

That's right, yes.

And your mom was a nurse.

Your dad taught social studies at the local high school.

And I understand you grew up working on your grandparents' farm where they grew corn and beans and raised pigs.

What kind of work did you do on the farm?

Oh, just menial labor.

I mean, my first job, you know, if you work in agriculture, you hope to have kids because that's your that's your labor pool and they'll work for a sandwich generally.

And so as a really small kid, grandpa would have me shovel out the poop out of the pig barn.

That was my first job bailing hay.

which means riding out behind the baler as the hay is harvested and stacking the bales, throwing them up in the barn.

And then on a soybean farm, one of the most prevalent summer jobs for young people is called walking beans, where you actually walk up and down the rows of the entire fields of soybeans, just killing the weeds.

We all learned to drive by the time we were 11 or 12 so we could haul empty wagons out to the field to be filled with corn and soybeans and stuff like that.

And then, you know, just odd jobs.

There was another job picking up rocks.

So once the harvest would be done and last year's stems would be plowed under and the dirt would be turned over, often rocks, sometimes as big as your head, would be turned up

in the soil and so you would be sent out with a tractor and a little trailer to just cover the entire field and pick up all the rocks you see.

I read that when you were in the fourth grade studying vocabulary, when your teacher taught the class the word nonconformist, she defined it as a person who did the opposite of what everybody else was doing.