Penick and Ford

During high school and college I spent several summers working in the Penick and Ford corn processing plant in Cedar Rapids Iowa. In addition to the summers I worked during some Christmas breaks and spring breaks. As I said in an earlier post, when I wasn’t in school I was working, and when I wasn’t working I was in school. I worked as much as I could to earn money for college.

My job at Penick and Ford was manual labor. I shoveled mountains of corn onto conveyor belts or into augers. I shoveled rock sulfur into a sulfur furnace that was making sulfuric acid. I pulled 50-pound bags of corn starch off of a conveyor belt and stacked them high on forklift pallets. I rolled 50-gallon drums of corn syrup into railroad cars and stood them up. I operated a fork lift. I filled vats the size of small water towers with corn syrup, dumped 50-pound bags of carbon powder into the vats, and heated the mixture with steam. I cleaned the filter system that removed the carbon powder and the impurities it absorbed from the corn syrup. I drove a 2-ton truck ferrying equipment because the supervisor’s license was suspended.

Work in the Penick and Ford plant was assigned by seniority. I wasn’t there long enough to gain any seniority, and never had a regular position. I’d show up for the 8am shift and sometimes there would be enough work that I got a job, and some days I was turned away. On the days I was turned away at 8am I would return for the 4 pm to midnight shift and usually got a job at that time. The afternoon shift paid an extra 10 cents per hour, so I did not complain. Sometimes the only shift available to me was the graveyard shift, midnight to 8 am. I did not relish it, but the extra 20 cents per hour was really nice.

My dad had a car to get to his job, and my mom had a car to get to her office job at Penick and Ford. I don’t recall how we worked it out, but occasionally I had access to Mom’s car at work. A couple times a week I would stash my running gear in the trunk of Mom’s car. After working an 8-hour shift of manual labor I would change into my running gear and run the three miles home for a workout. It wasn’t as much running as I needed, but it was all the energy I had left after working all day, or all night.

Coe College had a small computer that was located in the Registrar’s Office. During my first year at Coe College (70-71) I enrolled in the first of the two computer classes they had and enjoyed it thoroughly. Computing was in its infancy and I wanted to be a part of it. While I was working at Penick and Ford during the summer of 1971 I would stop by the Coe College Registrar’s Office to ask if they had any job openings. I tried to stop by at least once a week throughout the summer. More often than not these visits were on my way home from Penick and Ford, so I’d be wearing my hard hat, steel toed work boots, and my bib overalls which were filthy and stinking from the workday.

The Coe Registrar’s Office only had six or seven workers, so of course they never had any openings, but I was too young to realize that. After being rejected each time I’d stay and chat with the staff for a while just to make sure they would remember me. I wanted them to know that I was interested, earnest, and perhaps a bit desperate; surely they would remember the stinking, filthy, sweaty, skinny college kid when there was an opportunity for work.

My persistence resulted in a part-time job during the school year as a nighttime computer operator. Later on I became a tutor for the programming students, again, at night and during the school year. By my senior year I was working 20 hours a week, carrying a full academic load majoring in both Math and Physics, and was a varsity athlete in track and cross country. Spare time? What’s that?

I eventually got a summer job in the Registrar’s Office. I worked a full day in the office, and then when everyone else went home for the day, I stayed for an extra hour to vacuum, empty the trash, and dust. I was happy to get an extra hour’s work and an extra hour’s pay I could put toward tuition.

I try to close these posts with a short snappy sentence; a final word of wisdom containing the moral of the story, if there is one. What is the moral to this story? Is it something pleasant like “Persistence pays”? Or is it something more fatalistic like “Be careful what you wish for; you could end up working all day and all night”?