None of us knew where Muleshoe was located, and those from Muleshoe probably thought Detroit referred to a place in Michigan, but both parties learned quickly enough about the other’s location. Detroit and Muleshoe were both Texas towns. Over the course of a few weeks the Muleshoe project convinced me that I needed to go to college.
Growing The Business
In some of Mr. C’s many telephone calls, he had talked with a big shot of a food company, a subsidiary of Brown & Root Corporation, that was headquartered in New Orleans, LA. Mr. C. told the fellow about all the extra vat space we had at Gulf Pickle, but at the time, we might have had three empty vats. This conversation led eventually to Brown & Root visiting and signing a contract for us to salt cucumbers that were grown using irrigation technology on farms near Muleshoe, Texas, a town 450 miles away in the Texas Panhandle. As we were in Northeastern Texas, this meant that cucumbers picked on Monday in Muleshoe had to be at our place by sunup Tuesday, or shortly thereafter, or risk considerable spoilage from sun damage. The big reason we were contracted for the work was that we were 100 miles closer to Muleshoe than the next salting station for cucumbers, and that extra distance in the hot Texas sun was devastating economically. Neither Gulf Pickle nor Brown & Root complained about this business arrangement, and I learned a valuable lesson in business. The location of one’s business could be a significant factor in whether or not you were profitable: location, location, location is critical to success!
Hustle, Hustle, Hustle
You can imagine the scrambling the Muleshoe contract caused. Mr. C viewed it as a large problem that could be divided into lots of little problems, and the little ones could be more easily solved than focusing on the bigger issue. As usual he was correct about how to do something. Soon we worked almost 24/7 just to get ready for the produce from Muleshoe. First, we needed a lot more vats to handle the irrigated produce, and Brown & Root came to the rescue and located a source of used vats, all in acceptable condition for the perceived need.
Tom Cat, the foreman with his knowledge of how to do nearly anything mechanical plus overall management skill, my brother Mack with his accountant mindset, and Jack and I with youthful muscles drove Mr. C’s automobile to Nixa, Missouri, a suburb of Springfield, about 450 miles north of our location. With the exception of Tom Cat, we made $0.70/hour that summer. Since I had never been more than 125 miles from home, this was a big trip for me. In Nixa, we went to an unused ethanol factory that was either owned or controlled by the US Govt. Mr. C. had purchased, sight-unseen, many large vats to be used for the Muleshoe project, and we spent a week taking them apart. These vats were the smallest vats at the ethanol plant, but they were the largest vats we had at our place. For example, the staves that formed the sides of the vats were 3” x 4” thick redwood pieces of lumber, whereas I had been accustomed to working with staves that were about 1 to 1.5 inches thick and 4 inches wide. We numbered each piece so that we could reassemble them exactly, loaded all the pieces on a truck owned by Maurice Curfman and sent the entire batch to Northeast Texas for reassembly. Not one piece was damaged in the process. The only things we discarded were the severely rusted iron rods that held the vats together, but Tom Cat informed Mr. C. of this early in the week, and by the time we returned, a truckload of new sucker rods was ready for the reassembly process.
Unfortunately the new rods were straight, and they needed to be circular to fit around the vats, and there was no easy way to bend a straight rod around a vat, so we bent them by hard work and then dropped the circle over the top of the assembled vat. Rods were spaced about 10 inches apart from bottom to top of a vat, so we prepared about 12-16 rods per vat. These were cut to proper length, threaded to accept nuts, and each rod was bent into a circular shape with the use of a 16-lb sledgehammer. This was a job that required both brute strength and finesse since the rod needed to be bent into a flat plane circle. One fellow held the rod and kept it in perfect alignment, and a second man hammered away with the sledge. If a rod didn’t lay flat, it was rejected until any twist was eliminated. Bending the rods was exhausting work, and pairs of men would work for a few hours, and then a fresh pair of workers relieved them.
While some workers bent sucker rods, others started the reassembly, quite an affair. First we laid a foundation of crossties, and then we placed the bottom boards on the crossties. Clinched together these formed a circle about 10 feet in diameter and 3 to 4 inches thick. The staves were added in sequence. They projected about 3 inches below the bottom and 10 feet above to form the walls of a vat. A groove (dado) had been machined at right angles to the length near the end of each stave, and the bottom boards fit into this groove. Three assemblers were needed to position the staves around the bottom, a process that was accomplished one stave at a time. One man stood on a ladder, another on the ground, and a third assembler tacked a hemp rope near the bottom of each stave. The fellow on the ladder tacked a second rope on the top of the stave. Two others brought staves to the assemblers. This process was repeated until the shell was assembled, and the entire thing was held together initially with two ¼ inch ropes.
The next step was to attach the ¾ inch sucker rods; we started at the bottom and worked to the top. Tom Cat supervised this portion of the work very closely since it was critical that we attached the rods just tightly enough to not work loose or fall off. This was tricky since tightening a rod just a tad bit too much caused the rods just below it to fall several inches. This could be very time consuming so we solved the problem by stationing men at intervals around the vat and occasionally tacking the rods to a few staves. A loose fitting was absolutely essential since water caused either cypress or redwood to swell as they saturated with water. Staves in the wall or bottom of a vat that were pulled too close together with the sucker rods would succumb to the intense stress and buckle. When either type of board buckled, we often had to partially disassemble the vat, replace the damaged part, and reassemble the structure.
Once we began filling a vat with water, I was often assigned to wedge cotton batting into any crack that did not close properly from the swelling process. This was accomplished with a hammer and cold chisel, and I was soaking wet most of the day, a situation that caused severe chafing of my skin. Since only men were present, I would shed all clothing and work as naked as the day I was born. Beneath the vats and over most of the premises mud and muck had accumulated from discharge of wastewaters, salty and fresh (subjects of another story). This muck exhausted fumes with the worst stench I have ever smelled, and if the muck contaminated clothing, it was really difficult to remove the odor from the clothing. I became adept at this work, and I often spent many days at it. In some sense of the word, I became an apprentice cooperer.
I participated in all aspects of the assembly process, and the pace was almost frantic since workers needed to unload and dump the cucumbers quickly to get them out of the hot sun, and frequently I would be yanking a ladder out of a vat, having just washed the inside, as the first sacks of cucumbers were dumped into it (the pickling process is another story). To keep ahead of the scheduled number of vats needed each day I started work at 2:30 AM and readied 4-6 large vats by 7 AM and another larger batch before I left work. During the daylight hours I often split time unloading the trucks and preparing additional vats to receive cucumbers the next day. A 14 to 18 hour day was common fare. The largest number of trucks I recall arriving in any day was about 25. Each truck held a minimum of 44,000 lbs of cucumbers, packaged in sacks.
When I started at Gulf Pickle we had 16 vats with an average liquid capacity of about 1,000 gallons each. As the company grew, the number and size of the vats also increased considerably. By the time of my last employment at the Pickle Shed we had 50-60 vats at headquarters and 150 vats in Sherman, Texas, about 75 miles closer to Muleshoe. Thus, in the 5 years I worked at Gulf Pickle, Mr. C. expanded the business ten-fold, and by today’s standards that would be considered phenomenal.
Pickles vs. College
In mid-August, one hot day (@ 105 F) Pete B. and I were hard at work in the back of a very large trailer truck. Our job was to pitch sacks of cucumbers over the sideboards of the trailer on to conveyers, and other workers dumped them into the vats. Pete was at one end of the trailer, and I was at the other. Pete was about 8 inches taller and probably 30-50 lbs heavier than me, but the sideboards of the trailer rose nearly to my armpits. The sacks typically weighed an average of 100 lbs each, although occasionally a sack would appear that weighed as much, or more, than I weighed. While I was tough as boot leather and had more rock-hard muscles between my ears than gray and white matter, I wasn’t dumb, and after a couple of weeks of this work, I realized that a little guy was ill-suited for it.
Pete and I had had a particularly grueling morning trying to keep ahead of the crews who dumped the cucumbers into the vats. Shortly after lunch Pete asked me, “Guess what I’m going to do tomorrow? I’m going to Commerce to talk with the Dean of Students at ET about going to college in the fall – school starts around Labor Day, and I don’t want to do this kind of work for much longer.” About 4 PM, I asked Pete, “Would you mind coming by my house and letting me ride over to Commerce with you to hear what the Dean has to say?” “Yep” was his reply. Mr. C. was a big supporter of two of his workers taking this step, and he gave each of us the day off and later supplied towels and bed linens when we enrolled in college.
About 15 years later I was still going to college, and by then I had obtained a PhD and done 3.5 years of Post-Doctoral research at UC Berkeley. Pete had obtained a couple of degrees by then, served military duty in Vietnam, attended OCS and started a 20-year career in the US Army, where he eventually achieved the rank of Colonel, if not higher. It is safe to conclude that we started using our heads for something other than a hat rack.
I have often wondered what would have happened to me without Pete’s impromptu openness about his plans and his willingness to give me a lift to East Texas State to meet and discuss going to college with that Dean. While everyone in my family had expressed their desire for me to attend college, I had not made any plans for such an activity. I thanked Pete for his thoughtfulness the last time I saw him in 1984. Then, he worked at the Pentagon in Arlington, VA. Did the lessons we learned from observing Mr. C’s ability to handle people, plan and solve complex problems impact Pete’s career as it did mine? Without knowing the answer to that question, I am certain that Pete’s benevolent act of leadership for a friend and schoolmate since first grade led eventually to an easier life for me, and I hope it did for him as well.
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