Bookmark Project - Guardian Statue (culture) / The Next Summer at IBP

This was captured from my sister-in-law's backyard of a neighbor's statue on the other side of the fence.  One of those cases where I'd seen it from this perspective dozens of times, wishing I'd had a camera.  Well, finally brought one along and got my chance on a cloudy day when the light was more/less even.

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[continued from yesterday's post; series started 10/20]

When the summer of 1978 was over I returned to Nacogdoches and college, full of slaughterhouse and conversion experiences.  And financially I was taken care of for my third of the expenses.

Naturally, the next summer - the summer of 1979 - I returned to Amarillo and was hired again to work on the floor, and again, by request, assigned to the fat table.  Not much had changed, except the neighborhood was a little emptier.  Adjacent to the table were three work stations where the small intestines were skinned for sausages.  Due to a lack of demand for those skins, my neighbors were reassigned.  I'd gotten to know them the year before, and actually missed their presence.  Other than that the job was exactly the same.

Since I'd already developed a pretty good workflow, there was even more time that second summer to wander around and learn.  This time, though, I not only watched but tried many of the jobs I'd observed the previous summer: one of the jobs on the skinning line (without much success); I cut the heads off and placed them on hooks at the beginning of the head line (each weighing between 35 and 40 pounds); the squeegees in the blood pit; Ramón let me try my hand at skinning livers; and I even messed around on the gut table once in a while.  Every so often a foreman would have to kick me out of one of those places and order me back to the fat table.

This was also the summer that I gave my friend Johnnie Scholl a tour of the floor.  She'd heard me talk about the place for going on two summers, and was eager to let me show her around once I got permission from management.  After getting approval I took her to the plant one day after a morning shift, and proudly showed her all of the places I'd been talking about.  She was young and a drop-dead gorgeous blond, so we got a lot of cat-calls from the guys, but I hardly even noticed in my enthusiasm to share the place with my friend.  The only near-mishap was when an eyeball whizzed by as we were walking on the catwalk above the floor.

The end of the summer of 1979 marked the end of my tenure as a fat washer on the floor.  The summer-fall of 1981 (I was in Mexico the summer of 1980), I graduated up and beyond the fat table and was assigned to the third of the four jobs I ever did at IBP - that of boxing spleens, hearts and head meat which included cheeks and lips.