skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Very fortunately during our time walking around on deck these rays appeared, giving an opportunity for the silhouette of a nearby industrial complex.
____________________
(continuation from post of 09/20/17)
After such a happy and successful run my first summer earning college money on the kill floor at IBP, I decided to do it again the summer of 1979. The living arrangements were to be the same - I rented an apartment nestled in a corner on the first floor of Charlie's Plumbing at 6th and McMasters in Amarillo. That aspect alone of my time in Amarillo was a very bright spot. The rent was cheap and the store owners, Charlie and Johnnie Scholl, were awesome folks who were friends of my brother when he worked there as a lawyer. Charlie was a gregarious, fun-loving extrovert, and his wife was just as gregarious and fun-loving. The moment we met was one of the few times in life when an instant and lasting connection was made with folks that are just good people. At the time they had a toddler named Chip who had the run of the place.
But of course the purpose was to work another summer earning college money for my sophomore year. This time knowing a bit more about what to expect, within a few days of arriving I applied and requested B shift again, which worked out. I was hoping to be fat washer again also, but this time I wasn't injured so didn't have a reason to be there; I instead got a job that had a higher grade, thus paid a bit more ($6.05/hr), which was alright by me. In fact, before long I grew to like it, though there were no gaps of time that allowed me to explore as I'd done the previous year.
The job was located adjacent to the fat washing table, next to the gut conveyor and underneath the head line. My duties were to pack five kinds of meat into 80-lb boxes - cheek meat, lips, head meat, spleens and hearts. The exercise was great since they were heavier than the 40-pounders from the previous year, and the pace was much faster, which kept me on my toes. A great job. However, since there were two workers within my area (the head meat cleaners) and since I couldn't wander hither and yon, I didn't sing as much.
On to another cruise - this time in 2014. It was a seven-dayer going to Cozumel and Belize, and there will be a few dozen pics from the trip featured in this blog. The first are of the Bayport Terminal after we boarded but before departure. Little did I know that one day in the not-too-distant future I would be running around an area just like this as part of a new job. But at this time I was just glad to get an unfettered view of these magnificent cranes and the patterns they offered.
Four-shot panorama of same below:
Though this is being published much later, Harvey and its aftermath have just concluded here in the Houston area. Such devastation! Our house was spared, however, with nothing more than lots of rain and some wind, as can be seen in a neighbor's tree from an upstairs window.
Another one of those cases where you see something and tilt your head or lean down, saying, "Wish I had a camera to get that." This time I went and fetched it for the shots above and below back on the Fourth of July.
Sometimes you're standing near the garden, or viewing it from the porch, and say "Looks neat...I'll have to capture that someday." Such is the case with the shot above.
Followed this guy around for quite some time. As I had a slow lens installed on the Big Cahoona, out of about 50 shots this was the only keeper...
Got this shot from another angle on another day. Found out in post-capture that I'd accidentally changed the camera settings on the Big Cahoona to shoot at only three megapixels. Not a crisis, though, as attested by this and tomorrow's posts.
This is from a bean plant, the long kind favored by the Asians. Quite a harvest this year on these guys, thanks to my wife's diligence.
This plant was given to us as a house-warming gift last year. We've decided to care for our plants a little better at the new house, and are getting to know the needs of the different types. It's been a surprise that with just a little effort some get along quite well, rewarding us with sights and shots such as this.
A few years ago, while attending my stepmother's funeral in Delaware, several in the family took a walk along the Brandywine River close to her condominium. About a half mile upriver sat the tumbledown remains of Eleutherian Mills, the DuPont factory that supplied gunpowder to both sides of the Civil War, as I was told. Because it was winter the trees were leafless, lending a mysterious air to the fractured walls and broken panes of the structure. This was the perfect opportunity to take pictures of something through the bare branches of those trees.
If only I had a camera! Feeling that it would be obnoxious to tote a big rig around on such an occasion as the funeral of my stepmom, I left it at home. Thus, when we reached the historical site I was left with only my phone, a Samsung Note 4. After snapping a few at the iconic site and reviewing them post-capture at home I vowed Never again! The photos, while acceptable on the smartphone's screen, were lousy indeed.
A few years later and here we are at the Convention Center in Denver. I'd just bought an iPhone 7, which was supposed to have one of the best phone cameras on earth. Encouraged by all that was reported about its virtues, I snapped away, after getting a handle on exposure control, from our vantage point close to the back of the auditorium. It looked great on the screen and I was anxious to check it out on the big monitor in post capture.
Very unfortunately anticipation turned into disappointment, as technically and visually even this photo turned out to be of very low quality...which is the reason it's displayed in such a small size above. Those who assert that a phone camera will someday supplant a DSLR are sadly out of it. There is a long, long way to go.
This post concludes the series on Denver. Before moving on to another cruise that we took back in 2014, I'll post a half-dozen or so from in and around the house.
As stated in Monday's post, I managed to distinguish myself at IBP for the fact that I was so interested in everything happening on the floor. Why does this go there? What do they do with this part? Who uses that? And, because our duties were very repetitive, I enjoyed telling people that I did not work in an assembly line, but rather a disassembly line.
This overt fascination with the goings-on was blended with the fact that the summer of 1978 was pivotal in other ways for me. I was truly on my own for the first time. I was making good money for my college education. I was cultivating deep friendships in what until then had been a far-away city in which I knew no one. Most of all, I had embarked on a real Bible study for the first time in my life.
All of those things, and more, led to joy. And what happens to a person when he experiences joy? He sings! Yes, one day I found myself singing. I sang as I washed the fat. I sang as I carried the buckets of tendon. I sang in the freezer while spreading pancreas tissue. And, because the place was a noisy, bustling cacophony, I could do so at the top of my lungs and barely make a dent in the clamor.
This did not go unnoticed by my co-workers. Some thought I was crazy (possibly true). It made others smile, this oddball singing at the top of his lungs and apparently enjoying himself on the kill floor of a slaughterhouse. Yet others saw weakness, and exposed to me the raw edge of hatred. I learned a few things about human nature in the process. Regardless of all that, I kept singing.
And so it went in the summer of 1978, that in the unlikeliest of places I found my voice in more ways than one.
From just about anywhere in the city it was possible to see mountains in the distance, reminders of adventure nearby. The shot above was taken near the zoo; downtown is below:
Once in my new position as a fat washer things got better fast. Each day I reported for duty early to give the nurse time to treat my hand, then off I'd go into the bowels of the floor (no pun intended, sort of) ready for B shift.
Fat washing involved three primary duties. The first, of course, was to wash the fat, and that came from the stomach lining inside the gut. The guys on the gut conveyor would eviscerate the cows, after which the fat puller would heave and ho with it until the great sheets were separated from the stomach and could be hoisted up into a trough suspended above the line. This was all done while the line moved at a steady pace, which I'm sure seemed much too fast for the incredible amount of labor involved.
A faucet was installed above the trough to help flush the fat in my direction until it plopped out onto a wide, flat stainless steel table. It was then my job to use a spray nozzle to clean it of hair and other contaminants. Once satisfactorily cleaned, it was fed into a hopper with an auger at the bottom that drove the fat into a four-inch steam pipe that melted and transported it into waiting tanker trucks about a quarter of a mile on the other side of the plant. All a fascinating business.
The second of my duties involved washing tendons. There was a girl further up the line whose job it was to remove the tendons from the forelegs of the hanging beeves. Every once in a while, before they were full, I'd go to her position to retrieve the stainless steel with the tendons, and give her empty ones as replacements. Then I'd carry the full buckets to a separate room near the fat table that had two high-pressure nozzles pointing downwards. The buckets with the tendons would be hung onto the fixtures so that the water would jet into the product, removing excess blood, hair, etc. Once satisfactorily clean, I would remove them and box the tendons at 40 pounds each. I thought this was an interesting process as it was, but the fascination was taken to a new level upon learning that these tendons were sent all the way to China for consumption! (This was when the world was a larger place, and China seemed a faraway, inaccessible and exotic location.)
Lastly, my third duty turned out to be, in my opinion, the most important of all. Someone on the gut table had the job of removing the pancreas from the viscera of each cow and placing it into a plastic bucket (because it was not consumed as a food, it didn't have to be made of stainless). Every so often this bucket full of pancreases would be heaved my way, sliding on the floor until it reached a place where it could be retrieved. I then carried it into the nearby offal area where they had a very cold freezer, much colder than a home freezer, about 20 degrees below zero. In this freezer there were racks of plastic trays, onto which I would spread the pancreases out so they'd freeze faster. This was before synthetic insulin was widely available, and upon learning that these were used to make life-saving medicine for diabetics the job took on, in my mind, a heightened level of importance.
Of course the second and third duties had to be accomplished while the fat table was filling up, and a bit of time management had to be exercised to get it all done without a mishap. I worked on that until there was actually a bit of free time now and then. In fact, I got so good at it that my coworkers in places such as the head line, skinning lines, gut table and blood pit got used to my presence, peering into what they were doing and asking pesky questions. I was there to learn all that I could, and enjoyed every minute of it. A couple of times I even managed to make it all the way through cold storage and into the side of the plant where they cut the sides into steaks! It's a wonder that they didn't say something, but as long as I kept up with the job I could pretty much do what I wanted and go where I pleased.
The fact that I was actually interested in all this and loved the job earned me the nickname "Mr. IBP". Didn't mind that a bit, until singing at the top of my lungs earned me the scorn of a few of my fellow workers.
Looks like a museum, but turns out this is a justice building, called the Ralph L. Carr Judicial Center. The Colorado Attorney General is also housed here...
Many if not most downtowns have something like this...an old, historic-looking edifice next to modern glass structures. The Daniels and Fisher Tower is visible to the left.
Stepping forward and around the evergreens seen in yesterday's post yielded this view, with the top of the reflection still in place. Would have been easy to remove the lamp posts, but decided to keep those in place as well...
This one should have been published earlier in the reflections series, but here it is nonetheless, captured from the grounds of the capitol. Zoomed out from the same spot is the picture below.
____________________
(continued from post of 09/10)
So they moved me on the shroud line to the floor position, where it was our job to pin the bottom flaps of the shrouds up like diapers on both sides of the carcass. This pouched the loose ends of the meat and fat into a nice tidy bundle. Had to hurry, though...within about 15 seconds the sides disappeared through some doors into cold storage. Another part of the job was to sterilize the shroud pins, brought to us from the other side of the plant in a stainless steel cart, with a big yellow hose that gushed extremely hot water. After sterilizing we would use those pins while every so often handing some up to the girls when they ran out.
I thought, OK, didn't do so well up high... maybe here it will go better. Well, the dance routine continued with the sides of beef, and after a couple of days my steps were not getting any smoother. The guys kept telling me to relax, but after the failure up top I was tense and would often send the beef swinging and spinning, sometimes following it around in a complete circle. The dancing continued, sometimes ending with a view of my partner entering the cold-storage doors, half-dressed with pins uselessly dangling from the shrouds. It wasn't getting any better. But, to my credit, it was not for lack of trying.
My wife has always said that I have tofu skin, and that fact became apparent after a few days on the bottom of the shroud line. My desperate efforts to drill the pins through the cloth and into the beef caused holes to develop in the skin of my right hand, clear through the epidermis, in spite of the fact that I had on two pairs of gloves. At first I kept it to myself and refused to quit. But after two more days it got so bad I couldn't ignore the injuries and reported to the nurses station. They took one glance at my hands and called in the head foreman, whose name was Glenn. When Glenn saw the number and size of holes in my skin I was immediately reassigned to another station, which at level one was known to be one of the easiest jobs on the floor, where injured workers could convalesce until they were able to go back up the line. Very fortunately, this was where I stayed for the remainder of the summer. From that point forward, for the duration of the summer of 1978, I was to be a fat washer.
While hanging around on the capitol grounds I took my time in composing cityscapes that would do justice to this beautiful downtown. Skies were clear and the temperature was the warmest of our stay, up into the 80's. Could not have asked for better circumstances, and felt blessed for the opportunity to be meticulous in improving my craft.
While on the subject of spires, this guy is atop the First Baptist Church, corner of 14th and Grant.
Another view of the spire featured on the building in yesterday's post. Some would imagine this to be the state capitol, however it is actually Denver's City County Building, a more local government entity. Situated directly opposite, on the other side of Civic Center Park, is the capitol, the golden dome of which is featured below:
Tonight the Denver competition for the NBC hit Ninja Warriors airs (I'm writing this on July 17), and we were there back in May when they were setting up for the show. Always been intrigued with show business and hung around for a few minutes to watch. I was admonished one time for taking pictures, so walked around and snuck this one from a distance, using the awesome reach of my walkabout lens:
____________________
Of all the stories I tell at the dinner table or in class at church, the ones that most intrigue my listeners are my slaughterhouse stories. They are mostly Christian-based and clean in content, but because of the location inevitably contain an element of the strange, the different, the macabre. Not many folks know someone that's worked in a slaughterhouse.
And there weren't many people working at the slaughterhouse like me, either. Thanks to my brother Bob, who knew about the place and told me that good money was to be made if you can handle the labor, this is where I chose to work summers for college tuition. It was a large, busy and modern place - in fact the biggest and most productive slaughterhouse in the world at the time - and I'd be willing to bet that I was the only college student there that had plans to go back to school each fall (I worked there three summers). And I loved the work...something else that set me apart.
This was in Amarillo, at Iowa Beef Processors (IBP). My brother was there because he was a lawyer in town (for Tom Upchurch) who successfully defended the company against a lawsuit by one of its workers that got cut on the floor. By the time I got there, however, he'd moved away to a new job in Houston (Coastal). Thus, I rode into town not knowing a soul but had the support of a couple of his friends named Charlie and Johnnie Scholl, who set me up in a small apartment that occupied a corner of their plumbing shop at 6th and McMasters. Lots of stories there also, but I digress. Nutshell...it ended up being the best and most pivotal summer of my life.
Though so much more happened, the purpose of my going there was to make money, so the first order of business was - once I had wheels (a used car that Bob had owned while he was there, $150) - to head out to IBP on the edge of town and apply. I'd been told it was a shoe-in job, but was still a little nervous. Nothing to worry about, though - there was the application, the briefest of interviews, a physical, and I was in. The third or fourth day into town I showed up at the appointed time for my first day of work.
After getting set up with a locker I dressed in my work clothes for the first time, which included white short-sleeve shirt, white pants, boots and a yellow apron made from the same material as those big yellow raincoats you see men wear on shrimp and fishing vessels. Plus of course a hard hat. I looked ridiculous. Then, along with several others that were hired that day, we all walked for the first time out onto the floor.
And when I say floor, I mean kill floor. The plant was divided into two vast areas - one side was the kill floor, where all the disassembly took place, and the other was the cold side where they sliced up the sides of beef into the different cuts you see on the supermarket shelf. I wanted to be on the kill floor because - a) it paid more, and b) it wasn't cold; on the steak side the temperature was kept at around 40-45 degrees, and I wouldn't have lasted very long there.
So we all punch in with our brand-new time cards and walk onto the floor with a couple of foremen. I don't know about the other guys, but I was very curious and anxious to see what the kill floor of a slaughterhouse looked like, and full of anticipation about what job I would end up with in a place like that. After all, there was no turning back. I was there to earn college money and had to stick it out no matter what...quitting or changing my mind was out of the question. I was there to stay. Which is something else that set me apart, because about four out of five hired leave within two weeks because the work was so hard. My brother had told me about the turnover, and the reasons for it, which only strengthened my resolve.
But alas, there was mild disappointment for me because I was the first one they dropped off and couldn't even go all the way inside! The floor was set up so that from the locker room you walk next to what they call the shroud line, and the rest of the floor was down a ways and off to the right, so from the shroud line you couldn't really see the rest of what was going on. My day for that would come at another time.
The shroud line is where they pin big, salt-water-saturated cloths over the entire sides of beef as a last step before they went into cold storage; the salt acts as a preservative until they get cold enough to be processed on the other side of the plant, usually 24-48 hours. My first assignment was to climb a ladder to a place where they took the shrouds out of the salt water and draped them over the sides of beef, which were hanging by the Achilles from a meat hook. Then they stick a big pin in to secure it from up top so that on the floor another couple of workers could bring the bottom of the shrouds up to pin them on both sides, like a diaper. It was supposed to be a tidy job - no blood or guts involved - and at grade two (out of six) it was supposed to be fairly easy.
But not for me. In the rush of getting the shrouds out of the water, draping them over
properly and then jamming that dastardly pin through the cloths and into the
meat - all while the line was moving at an impossible pace - I would
often appear as though I were dancing with the meat, spinning it around
and twisting the shroud that flayed about like a wayward dress. I spent just a day at that higher position before the girls (yes, girls) up there decided I was incompetent, so they sent me to the bottom. At least there I could have some man time and bond with the guys doing the diapers.
But of course, who likes to stick with the conventional?
These guys must have been hot. Note that all but one have long sleeves on as protection from the sun...
Adjacent to the Civic Center Park was the Denver Post Building; more conventional shots below:
The fellow in Wednesday's post was directly across the street from this landmark, Civic Center Park, familiar to anyone that's been in downtown Denver. After crossing the street got the shot below between two of the columns:
With the bonus of time that I had to wander around downtown, there were lots of opportunities besides reflections to capture. Saw this buildingside and was attracted to the seal at the bottom, seen close up below:
As mentioned in a recent post, there was a fair amount of homelessness and encampments downtown. The shot above is reminiscent of this one captured in New York City. Wider view below:
A couple more from the same arrangement, highlighting the blue flowers...
One time I entertained the idea of selling my photos to a stock site such as Shutterstock. One such site made it a point that they want no more flower pictures, saying they already had millions and that was enough. I'm not sure I'd've done that. A million more can be just as unique and jaw-dropping in originality (not that I'm saying that mine qualify for inclusion in that category). Years ago a friend from church named Ed Krempel took an astounding macro flower pic, from deep in its interior, the likes of which I'd not seen before or since.
After walking Chenjean to her meeting one day, while Allison was still asleep at the hotel, I hung around the Center and just took pictures for a while. At times the simplest subjects can take up the most time. These Christmas-tree-looking things were dotted here and there, providing ample opportunity to draw out the beauty as though it were a much bigger object. Original below:
Such a curious thing, these blue trees around the Convention Center. In post-capture study I learned that this was done by an activist artist named Konstantin Dimopoulos to increase awareness and decrease complacency about these vital living things that surround us. In Denver they were painted beginning April 18th (we were there in the latter half of May) with a biologically safe, water-based and non-permanent paint. Certainly got my attention.
Below is same from another part of downtown:
A very artfully designed building, this Convention Center. The foothills in the background are what Allison and I drove through to get to the mountains featured in posts a few weeks ago.
The pic below was taken from the other end of the street:
