One of the first jobs I had was bagging fertilizer. It sounds terrible, but it was actually a good gig. It was a long, low, rambling, deteriorating, unpainted wooden building in a distant corner of the local packing plant, a serious producer of cow excrement. Through some odd quirk of nature, dung makes excellent fertilizer.
It was easy, and nobody came around very much, so I could sneak into the oven room and get stoned. In that room the smell would be hidden under other, stronger odors. Spring came and they shut down fertilizer production. I started helping out in the packing plant, it was terrible, back breaking, soul crushing labor, and I was close to quitting.
The owner, Tuffy was his name, asked me to help him move some things from his farm to an unused building on the property. It was better than stacking and salting cowhides in the hottest room I had ever been in, which was better than most of the jobs, so I went.
Tuffy was an old guy, his children had all moved away, his wife had passed away and all he had was his packing plant. He talked all the way to the farm and back. I listened. He rambled on about the how he was in Korea, about coming back, getting married, building his business. He was proud of what he had accomplished. And he wanted somebody to talk to. And that became my job, the guy who swept, cleaned, sorted mail, and rode around with the owner to get stuff. His eyes were going bad, they were covered with a rheumy film, so it could be exciting.
Tuffy hated Nixon, he thought Nixon had given too much to Saudi Arabia after the OPEC oil embargo. He hated Gerald Ford, “Just a little Nixon” He told me. He hated Billy Carter, because Billy Carter was a liberal democrat from the south. More than anything though, he worried about Saudi investments in the US. He really believed the country was on the path to being a colony of Saudi Arabia. In fairness there were a lot of people worried about the growing wealth of the Middle East in general and the Saudi Kingdom in particular.
“I ain’t selling my business to them Arabs.” He told me and he meant it.
In the fall a huge corporation that owned several large packing plants and feed lots in Iowa started construction on a packing plant less than two miles from Tuffy’s. They spread a lot of money around the city council and used an odd twist of eminent domain to confiscate Tuffy’s land to build access roads and a rail spur.
Last time I saw him he had tears in his eyes and was staring at the building that used to be his. It was the Iowans that got him, not the Arabs.
Several years later I was working at a small screen printing plant, it was one of the first jobs I got after moving to Ohio. It was one of a group of small companies producing casual wear.
There was an older lady there, Mary Maxine, she worked in the same department as I did. Her and her husband had moved there from West Virginia. I was never sure why. Maybe it was because the West Virginia state economy was built on coal mining, an occupation that kills the miner and (though it wasn’t as obvious then) everybody else. It was killing her husband, slowly, painfully. It was all he could do to drive from Sunbury to Westerville every morning to take her to work and then return in the afternoon to pick her up.
She was, at times, surly and short, her life had been difficult and you could tell she never planned on operating a die-cut machine into her sixties while she had the unique misery of watching her husband slowly suffocate.
One day, shortly after I started, the president of the company called us into a meeting. We all crowded into his office, it was where we held all the meetings. Folding chairs had been set up, and the couches and arm chairs were filled when I got there, so I sat right in the middle, in an ancient chair that had jagged, evil sharp edges ringing the bottom. I couldn’t stop touching them, my hand just kept going back to the same spots.
“We just wanted to let you know the company has been sold.” He started, and was about ready to explain further.
“You didn’t sell it to Japanese, did you?” Mary Maxine asked, loud, the fear obvious in her voice. At the time, to be fair, a lot of people were worried about the enormous wealth being accumulated in Japan and the investments and purchases they were making in America.
He, the company president, reassured her, and all of us, the new owners were a group of venture capitalists from Chicago, Illinois. They had bought the whole organization, and he explained he couldn’t sell the company he was an employee, just like her. They were going to invest in equipment and training to make everything run a little smoother.
Two years later they closed down the plant, hauled all the equipment away and left us all unemployed. Mary Maxine was crestfallen, she had no idea what she was going to do, she lost her income, her insurance, and what little hope she clung to. Cut loose by Illinoisans.
I don’t know what became of Tuffy, or Mary Maxine. After so long I’m sure they have joined the choir invisible, left this place of wrath and tears.
I think about them sometimes, and sometimes I think about Pogo, by Walt Kelley, who so famously said; “We have met the enemy and he is.” We don’t have to look overseas to find somebody willing to make a little money off our misfortune.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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