Knocking salt off cow hides in winter cold and repairing flat tires on a hot August day were two pivotal jobs in 1963 that led to my career sitting at a desk.
This might be my personal “dirty jobs” history.
I was a 17-year old high school senior who was still relatively clueless about where I was going with my life.
Jobs were plentiful but the Vietnam War was waging and gobbling up young men who weren’t in college or married. Deciding on what kind of career was a big deal, mainly because of that war pressure.
A Packing Plant?
One of my best friends was Everett Rowland, who I admired greatly. His father had died and Everett, besides going to high school full-time, worked nights at a beef slaughterhouse and packing plant in Postville, Iowa.
The plant was called Hygrade and it has had a colorful history, but I digress.
Everett was an all-state football tackle and big and strong. I weighed about 145 pounds and might have been called wiry, not sure. Definitely not big and strong.
But my friend was persistent. “Come work with me and we can make lots of money,” he said. So, one night on Monday, Dec. 17, 1963, I did.
It was winter time and the plant was very cold. Our job was a very simple one. We worked as teams of two. We would sort and load the hides of recently slaughtered cows. The hides were buried in mountains of salt. Our job was to pick up a hide, each holding an end, and shake the salt off it, and then slam it down on the ground totally removing the salt. It required lots of shakes and lots of slams. We were paid one penny for each hide we did.
For hours, we shook and slammed hides. They paid us cash after our shift. As we left that morning, Everett was in a great mood. He had enjoyed sharing his work with buddy Bill.
Me? I was devastated. Not only was I physically destroyed but my mind was numb from the repetition and the stench. As I recall I barely made it home, which was 30 miles away. My mom was furious with me because I stunk to high heaven with the odor of dead cows.
The next day, Everett inquired if I wanted another go?
Not in a million years, I told him. That experience had a big influence on my future outlook toward work. And it made me despair the rest of my life for folks who are forced to do such mindless physical work.
My admiration for Everett soared.
Repairing Tires
I spent my years from eighth grade to senior high working at my dad’s gas station in our little town of Wadena, Iowa.
Wadena is a beautiful little place nestled in the hills of northeast Iowa.
If you worked in a small station in a small town, you learn to do lots of odd jobs. My primary job, besides pumping gas, washing windshields, checking oil, and sweeping out cars and trucks, was fixing flat tires.
This was an era where tires were just not reliable. Most people drove on retreads, which is an old tire that had new tread glued on it. I always believed you might be lucky to get 50 miles out of them before they sprung a leak.
The middle of August in Iowa is a horrible time of year. The mercury would reach 100 degrees and so did the humidity. These were years before air conditioning was commonplace. The season was called “dog days” because even the dogs would go crazy in the heat.
On Saturday, Aug. 17, 1963, I set a record at our station. I repaired 12 tires. Now today, tire stores use air pressure to break the bead, and remove the tire from the tire rim.
Not so, 62 years ago. You used pry bars and heavy hammers to break the bead, which is the side of the tire that adheres to the rim when air is applied. To repair a tire, you had to “break the bead,” so you could then pry the rubber tire off the metal rim. You then patched the hole in the tire and then reversed the earlier procedure. Normally you would do a typical tire in about an hour.
On this day, we seemed to have a non-stop parade of farm trailers, pickups, and cars showing up with leaks or flats which needed to be fixed. I was their man.
It was really hard work, very sweaty, and somewhat pressure-packed since everyone was in a hurry. Finally, about 8 p.m. we closed down the station and I headed home, exhausted, sweaty, and very, very dirty.
When I got home, my mom took one look at me and had a fit.
She made me stand outside in the yard while one of my brothers hosed me off, trying to alleviate as much of the dust and tire smells before I headed to the family bathroom for a shower.
As for my future, my dad always wanted me to run gas stations. My mom wanted me to be a journalist. Thankfully, partially because of that day, her ideas prevailed.
Respect For Physical Jobs
Working at the packing plant for one night and working at the station that one awful August day stand out in my lifetime of work experiences.
I also did a little bit of haying for local farmers and our family mowed the town’s cemeteries.
Doing these things certainly gives a person more reasons to respect those good folks who spend their time breaking their backs for the good of the rest of us. And let’s give a nod to immigrants from time immemorial who have had to do them.
Thankfully I have had a career that required little more than the ability to type keys on a keyboard or snap a shutter on a camera.
Bill Sniffin can be reached at: Bill@CowboyStateDaily.com
