Bulldozers, Check Pools, and Dirty Tricks

Before story time begins, here are some daisies to delight your day. Now…

In the summer of 1953, with a steady girlfriend, and looking forward to college, I needed to make as much money as possible to support my way through school, and plan for marriage. Caterpillar Tractor Company in East Peoria, a forty-five minute drive from Havana, my hometown, offered the best paying jobs.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, none of us realized the economic prosperity we were enjoying. After graduating from high school, I just drove to East Peoria, walked in the front door of Caterpillar Tractor Company, and walked out with a job. It paid the handsome wage of $1.56 an hour, more than double the $.75 an hour I had earned on my best summer job, detasseling corn.

High school ended my twelve years of public education, and college would begin my secondary education, but a summer at Caterpillar provided its own informal schooling and orientation into the rough and tumble world of an industrial factory. Caterpillar is world-famous for its bulldozers and wide range of road building and engineering equipment. I saw much of this manufacturing prowess, but my three months at Cat taught me more about the life and times of the workplace and workforce.

My experiences at “Cat” are probably out of the ordinary, because I was assigned to the Research division, and much of the time our duties were the mundane tasks of fabricating and delivering to engineers the steel and other materials for their research and experimental projects. We were far removed from the assembly line activities associated with factories like automobile plants.

My first days on the job, right away I learned that after punching the time clock, the daily routine began with rehashing the previous night’s television shows, and bragging about sexual conquests, real and imagined.

Marvin, my foreman, a crusty middle-aged man, delighted in initiating greenhorns like me into the realities of the world.

“Are you married?”

“No, but my girlfriend and I are practically engaged.”

He frowned. “DON’T GET MARRIED!”

“Uh, why not?”

“You’ll regret it if you do. Play the field. You’ll get more nookie as a single guy.”

One of the other guys asked him, “Well Marvin, why did you get married?”

“I thought I had to.”

This was the kind of coarse banter that started the day, shocking my rather innocent mindset.

In high school I had heard some swearing and “dirty talk,” but nothing like the language at Cat, which is too vulgar and graphic to include here.

Much to my surprise, the in-house union newsletter was almost as crude as the “shop talk,” using gutter language to badmouth the company owners and managers. It shocked me to see that kind of swearing and bitter attacks in print.

I had trouble finding my place in this group of frustrated, disgruntled, bitter men. And my rude awakening to the ambiguities of factory life wasn’t limited to workers, it extended to managers like my foreman.

The guys told me that Marvin ran the check pool, and I should get in it. On payday, every two weeks, each paycheck had an identification number. The fellows used the numbers to create a poker hand—for example, two 1s meant two aces, three of a number were three of a kind, three of one number and two of another counted as a full house. To join the check pool, you gave Marvin a dollar, and on payday, the person with the best poker hand won the pool.

I thought that Cat was a high-powered industrial factory, and the talk and focus would be on creating bulldozers and other equipment, but I was dead wrong. Workers seldom mentioned the products that made their company famous.

The excitement over the check pool ranked as one of the highlights of the workday. Right up to the day before we got paid, workers pestered Marvin, “How much is in the check pool?” Or, “Can I still get in the pool?”

On payday, most workers complained about the “bad hand” they had received, or moaned about how close they had come to winning the jackpot.

At the time, gambling was illegal, and officially, Caterpillar banned such activities. But here was my foreman, running a kind of “numbers” game, and the majority of workers participated in it.

In junior high and high school, we always had at least one student who got picked on, the person (usually a guy) who did poorly in classes.

I soon found out that human dynamics at Caterpillar had much in common with the jungle of characters at public school, including the stooge. The major divide at Cat lumped factory personnel into regular workers and management. A foreman occupied the intermediate position, belonging to management, but directly in touch with the regular employees. Among blue collar workers, the pecking order sharply separated “sweepers” from regular employees. The label “sweeper” meant literally those who just swept the floor. They had nothing to do with manufacturing, and received lower wages.

Like the public school student at the bottom of the class, the sweeper ranked as the lowest category in the factory. It seems that in every situation, the weak and less skilled are vulnerable. Sweepers served as the favorite target of regular workers, who liked to lord it over them and play jokes on them. In our research section, George was the sweeper who served as the butt of pranks.

George reminded me of Dwight, a kid I had known in high school, who everyone liked to tease. He had two buck teeth, made all the more prominent by his rather fat lips, and his perennial half smile, half smirk. The first time you saw him, you couldn’t help but think of a laughing beaver. Students loved to pull his chain, calling out, “Hey, Dwight.” He always answered, “Who, me?” That earned him the nickname of “the who-me kid.”

George reminded me of Dwight, because he had a similar facial expression, never a natural grin or a full frown, but an in-between pose as if he had preloaded his response to the latest practical joke about to be pulled on him. He seemed to be prepared to laugh at the trickster, or laugh with him, to counteract and preempt being laughed at.

Dwight in school, George in the factory—each reminded me of the Cheshire cat whose exaggerated smile was as intriguing and unreadable as Mona Lisa’s suggestive but elusive expression.

George’s appearance was so striking that if you saw him once, you’d never forget him. His most prominent feature, a bushy black moustache, drooped down from his nose and threatened to cover his mouth. He always had his hands wrapped around a long push broom, gripping it with two fists at the end of the handle. When he swept, he leaned forward, the tip of the broom almost touching his chin.

The push broom’s long black bristles matched his black moustache, making you wonder if tendrils of his moustache had passed down the handle of the broom and grown out of it. Or the fibers of the broom had climbed up through the handle and become imbedded in George’s upper lip. George’s broom had become his inseparable companion, a tool that served as a teddy bear.

Workers loved to tease George about the broom. “Are you married to that broom?” “Do you take it home at night and put it between you and your wife?”

Once in a while George forgot and left the broom leaning against a wall or post. Workers quickly hid it, and waited for George to reappear.

“Alright, who has my broom?”

Everyone professed ignorance. Then one would say, “I think somebody borrowed it to clean up a mess in the bathroom.” While he hurried to the restroom to find it, the one who hid it would put it back in its earlier location.

Upon his return, he did a full grin and laughed. “Okay, okay, very funny. I know you hid it.”

The guys would shrug. “George, nobody hid it, it’s been there all along.”

The worst joke, that almost became an accident, was when he propped his broom against a post and went to the restroom. The guys greased the handle, so that when he grabbed the tip and then leaned his weight against the handle with both fists, he slipped forward and almost fell to the floor, bruising his cheek against a bench as he fell.

That was the only time I saw George get mad. We didn’t know much about his background, except that he was born in Albania, and came to America as a teenager, never fully mastering English. When he fell against the bench, anger and pain made him lash out in Albanian. The guys tried to get him to translate his comment. He just said, “Better you not know.”

Another favorite trick played on every new employee, and repeated frequently for George, was the lunch bucket prank. We always had on the shop floor heavy chunks of scrap metal weighing ten pounds or more. The ruse was to remove a guy’s lunch and replace it with a piece of metal. When the victim stopped for lunch and picked up his lunch bucket, the weight of the metal almost pulled his arm out of its socket. The guys would tease George, “That’s a heavy lunch today.” “Be careful not to break your teeth chewing it.”

Toward the end of that summer I had my first and only interaction with management. The employment application process included not only a physical examination, but a mental aptitude test. I scored well on the test, and Cat offered me a place in their management training program, which included taking courses at Bradley University in nearby Peoria. I thanked them for the invitation, but said I had decided to go to college.

Before the summer ended, I received an unintentional souvenir of my summer at Cat. An order came over the phone for a sheet of steel. My boss told me to handle the hooks to grip the steel so that his crane could lift and transport it. Each sheet of steel must have weighed a ton or more. He used a lever to raise the edge of the steel enough for me to insert the hook. Somehow I got the finger next to my pinky on my right hand between two sheets of steel just as my boss dropped the top sheet.
I didn’t manage to move quickly enough, getting the tip of that finger mashed. I pulled it out, but it was no longer pink. The weight of the metal had squeezed all the blood out, making that finger as white as a boiled shrimp. We jumped into a pickup truck and made a quick trip to first aid. They X-rayed the ringer, which showed a break, but no cast was required. The doctor and nurse administered a shot for pain, cleaned and bandaged the finger, and sent me back to work. Caterpillar, like every company, keeps a record of days of work lost to accidents. The doctor told me there was no need to miss any work. He said to hold that finger above my heart, so that after the pain shot wore off, the throbbing wouldn’t be so bad.

Never in my life have I been subjected to so much razzing as when I went back to work with a finger held up in front of my chest. Here are just a few of the taunts.

“No, not that finger, the middle finger.”
“Well, screw you, too.”
“F____ you!”

I was glad that after a few days the throbbing eased, and I could lower my hand.
That finger is permanently damaged, its round contour flattened a little. In cold weather it doesn’t have sufficient circulation to stay warm, and complains with mild pain.

I had declined Cat’s invitation for a management training program. You might say I gave them the thumbs down.

Caterpillar gave me their own memento for my summer’s work—the finger.