Meat Packing, Watchman - 1970 & 71

I truthfully don't remember exactly the timing...I think during the summer between my junior and senior years. I went to a two week ROTC summer camp in Topeka, Kansas, that year and a week summer class at U of Minn so it wasn't a full work summer. I will digress...

My best friend in college during my sophomore, junior and senior years was a wild Irishman from Minnesota named Patrick Condon. We did everything together but were not roommates, his roommate, Vince, was also Irish from the same hometown as Patrick. They were insane together, I was the calm one. Patrick joined SAE with me and we were both in USAF ROTC. 

The summer of 1970, Patrick drove to Brookings where I picked him up and off we went to summer camp at Forbes AFB, KS (now closed). We were both just 21 and had both taken a liking to Singapore Slings. Summer camp was a two week very mild boot camp. We were allowed to leave the base on the weekend so Patrick and I rented a hotel room and filled our cooler with Singapore Sling materials. It was a rough weekend and put me off Singapore Slings forever. We went back to our homes and I think I got the job I will describe below, but...  

Senior year started off very good. I was elected president of the fraternity, my 1970 yearbook was a hit, I was the business manager/photographer for the yearbook, I had a scholarship, I was engaged, it was all good. Then it all came crashing down. We had one of the most successful parties of the year in mid-October, the annual, SAE traditional Paddy Murphy event which had followed the SDSU Hobo Day Homecoming weekend. Most of us were heading for home for Halloween and some down time. Back to school on Monday but mysteriously, no Patrick. Our fraternity advisor called me, he had been called by the family. 

Patrick and Vince had been racing around on a country road, no seatbelts. Vince lost control of the car and it left the road. Pat was thrown out of the car which rolled over on him killing him instantly. I was devastated and disoriented. The fraternity chapter tried to pull together to help one another but none of us had experience with a death of a school mate and in those days schools were ambivalent about tragedy. About a dozen of us made the 3 hour drive for the funeral. I used my position as chapter president to create a memorial for him and to give him an honorary SAE pin (we were not officially SAE yet). 

Back to the job. I'd spent time on the cutting floor and cleanup which I'll describe in another post. They were both brutal, especially hard because I was the bosses' kid and there was very little mercy given. The plant's chief operational person was Joe Stahl, I really liked him, he was a great guy and very supportive of my dad. [[Short aside: Joe was the one that lobbied dad to no longer prohibit employee's children from working at Armour's. Dad and Joe had a falling out in the last years of dad's life, I don't know why. I saw Joe last when we put dad in the nursing home for rehabilitation. Joe and his wife Marge were in the hospital...Joe was being treated for terminal lung cancer (lifetime smoker). I went to see him and was saddened and shocked by all the tubes and the sight of a strong man fighting a losing battle.]]

The plant had two "watchmen" on duty at all times, one in the plant and one in the yards. Almost all of the vacations were in the summer and they didn't have "extra" watchmen to fill in when someone went on vacation. To fill in they would do double shifts which was hard and not well liked by the watchmen. Joe asked me if I'd be interested in filling in and of course I said yes because almost anything was better than the floors. The pay was still good although no overtime and piece work but still was better than most of the rest of Huron.

They were called watchmen because they used to carry "watches" or clocks. The clocks were about 6 inches round and three inches deep. Throughout the plant there were "stations" that were important, usually cooler thermometers, railroad monitors, etc., and each one of those stations had a different shaped key. The watchman would go to each of the station in the appointed order (rounds) and get the key which was hanging on a chain and wind the clock. You couldn't go out of order and if you failed to go to a station, the clock would show which one you'd missed. They had just quit using them when I started but I saw the clocks and the keys which had been left hanging.

I always had the midnight shift, from 11 pm to 7 am. The midnight shift watchmen would switch to the vacationer's day or night shift and I would get the midnight. And the weekend. I always worked the weekends. My job was to walk around, check the temperatures of all the coolers and freezers, check all the railroad cars that were on the loading dock track, check in any trucks or trains that were arriving (very few did at that time of day) and just keep a general eye on the place.

The plant was large, 6 concrete floors, probably 600,000-800,000 square feet, each floor split into several functional areas. You could walk the whole thing in about a half hour. There were no procedures for watchmen and no real training. I made it my goal to do one complete round each hour. Occasionally I would find something amiss and have to call in an engineer or facility person. Most of the time there was nothing wrong, The cleanup crew worked until two in the morning, the government inspectors would show up around 6 in the morning so there were only a few lonely hours. 

There was one truck driver who drove a couple of times a month to and from Denver, Colorado. He would bring Coors back in his cooler truck. Back in those days, Coors was not pasteurized so most states wouldn't sell it, the beer had to be cooled from production to the customer buying it...so it was unavailable in South Dakota. Except to me. I paid him about $5 a case (I wasn't the only one) and he'd show up around five in the morning and we'd offload 5-10 cases.

For some reason one day I had a night shift, hours 3 to 11. This was a busy time because lots of trucks were leaving the loading dock. Of course, you didn't have to do rounds during the first half of the shift because the place was still jumping, however about 7 it was just the cleanup (normally) and I would walk around to ensure everything was properly running or stowed. This shift a walkabout was still 30-40 minutes because with cleanup, you didn't bother where they were working. There was a "guard house" at the gate. It had filing cabinets, a desk, phones, a couple of chairs...about 8x10'. This was the place watchmen sat when they weren't out walking and also the only entry to the plant (8' chain linked fence surrounded the plant).  When you were out walking, you'd close and lock the walk-in and the drive-in gates. 

One night around 9 pm my dad stuck his head in the guard shack. I had just completed my rounds and was reading a book (I read a lot). He yelled at me and asked why I was reading a book on company time, didn't I know there were rounds? I explained that I had just returned. He left without responding. So...I began to record on paper all the temperatures of each cooler and each truck and each railroad car...things that I had checked but never written down. Of course it took longer. I would put them in the watchmen's outbox for reading by Joe Stahl the next day. After a few days of doing this, Joe came to me and told me to stop writing reports. I explained to him that dad didn't believe I was making my rounds and so i wrote these down as evidence. He told me that the other watchmen didn't like me doing this and were afraid that they might have to do it too. I stopped.

The "kill floor" was the top floor...the sixth. Hard to believe but when they built the plant, they built a runway from the stockyards to the kill floor. It was quite long. During the weekend when I was the only one there, I would go to the sixth floor where the runway and the plant joined. The runway usually had straw and dirt in it and there were always mice. I had a .22 rifle and shot the mice from the walkway above the runway. That was my ofttimes between rounds on the weekend. If there were no people in the plant.

This is what a watchmen's watch looked like, you'd carry with the straps over your shoulder like a side bag.