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When I was a kid, the most significant meaning of Labor Day was that is signaled the beginning of another school year. Our summer vacations began Memorial Day and ran until Labor Day so it was not greeted with much enthusiasm by the younger crowd.

It was a day of reckoning involving a loss of freedom, books replacing fishing poles, homework replacing comic books, pick up baseball games relegated to Saturday and staying up as late as you wanted to was outlawed.

When I finished school and got a job, Labor Day was a welcome respite, a long weekend and a lot of folks took off to the Carolina coast for one last beach fling or ocean going fishing trip or a trip to the mountains for a couple of days of cooler weather and sight seeing.

When I became a professional musician, Labor Day became just another digit on the calendar since musicians work while everybody else plays and it has little special significance to those of us who spend most of our holidays working.

I never really thought much about what the origins of the day were, just figuring it was a day Congress had set aside to honor the American worker, and basically it is. But what prompted it's inception had much more sinister seeds and actually sprang from a bloody labor movement in 1894.

Back in the day when the railroads were the prime source of long distance travel in America, the Pullman, or sleeping cars on a train, afforded the luxury of a good nights sleep and during overnight trips the regular train seats could be converted into curtained bunks and back into regular seats the next morning.

These special railroad cars were built by the Pullman Company near Chicago and when the company, laid off some employees, reduced the pay of others but did not reduce the rent of workers living in Pullman�s �company town� in Chicago, where most of the workers lived, around 4,000 of them went on strike.

The strike expanded and at it's height involved around 250,000 railroad workers and crippled the movement of passengers and freight in parts of the country shutting down much of the rail service west of Detroit and instigated the involvement of the federal government.

Things got ugly and when the smoke had cleared, 30 Pullman workers had been killed by the Army and federal marshals. Needless to say this didn't set well with American workers.

Shortly thereafter, Grover Cleveland and Congress designated the first Monday in September as Labor Day, a day set aside to honor the American Labor Movement, and one has to wonder if Labor Day was actually started as an attempt to placate American labor, an extended olive branch after such a horrendous act.

Aside from it's most inauspicious beginning, Labor Day has become a much anticipated holiday in America with parades, sporting events, the beaches and highways crowded with folks who want one more shot at the summer fun before the frost bird and his frigid cousins arrive to begin another long winter.

We've had a lot of rain this August and the trees and grass in our part of Tennessee are a deep and healthy shade of green, but it won't be long now before a stark, leafless gray overtakes the trees and the grass will turn brown, the legacy of Labor Day.

Have a wonderful Labor Day, America!

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Pray for our troops and the peace of Jerusalem

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels