WannaskaWriter

    By the early 1980s, I had done various jobs around town and ended up working evening shift at the toy factory with Pete, then a hefty bull of a young man with long reddish-gray hair, mustache and full beard that was sometimes festooned with bits and pieces of steel and aluminum shavings, little chunks of snus, or the crumbs left over from a sandwich. I learned quickly that Pete either liked you or he didn’t, and didn’t mince words otherwise. Thankfully for me, it was the former as we worked in close proximity to another for that year machining spindle housings on two ancient lathes with eight-foot beds. Each lathe had a brass plate that read: “Approved by The War Board” on it and lent us the notion that the toy factory spared no effort providing us with the best 40 year-old tooling money could buy. Even so, ‘Foog,’ (As in, ‘The Mighty Foog,’ his nickname derived from his last name) loved the old equipment and maintained it with a fervor only matched by h...

    My first job at the toy factory was, using a chisel and a hammer, to chop out distorted plastic bushings from a long aluminum channel that a heavy suspension rod went through. The job was outdoors, on the south side of the building, in direct sunlight. I worked alone, breaking those bushings apart so that new bushings could be installed. I recall my foreman diligently checking on me and bringing me water and potato chips to keep me from getting heat stroke. Though I sweated profusely, the heat didn't bother me too much as I was somewhat used to very hot summers, living in Iowa as I had most of my life to that point.      His concern impressed me for he seemed genuine in his efforts. He had lived in the area all his life and did various jobs in the community as a youth. After he married his high school sweetheart and started a family, he began working at the toy factory because it offered workers good pay and insurance. He had been there five or ...

    My dad worked at the Des Moines Cooperative Dairy for forty years, and I did too, if but just for nine, many years later . When I was a kid, my dad worked for a time in the main plant. It was only a block or so down the from where we lived, so I visited it frequently, taking him his lunch or for other reasons. The dairy environment then, was noisy, they sometimes used steam hoses and lots of hot water to sanitize stainless steel pipes, to wash down milk storage tanks, or flush the red tile floors. The dairy dried milk too, so there was the voluminous noise of air through giant duct-work. There were big dark-green boilers that roared ominously in the Boiler Room; the red warning lights blinking, maybe a loud shrill bell would sound to signal something. And then there was the Engine Room where huge electric motors, the size of Volkswagens, that I'd walk by within arm's length, that powered almost everything in the building. I was used to all that noise because I pr...