My friend Gwen Lindberg of West Point, Nebraska, e-mailed me that Mabel Heineman just died. She was 75. The funeral will be Thursday at 10:30 a.m. at St. Paul's Lutheran Church in West Point.
I interviewed Mabel, her husband Bud (Louis), and Bud's former boss, Cliff Johnson, in April, 2003, at the Heinemans' home on River Street in West Point. These are some of the nicest folks you'll meet. I am reprinting my notes of that visit with the Heinemans in full here, in memory of Mabel. This is the stuff of real life and a tribute to real people.
What more can one say? I will offer this: Rest in peace, Mabel Heineman. Go with God.
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Louis and Mabel Heineman are modest folks
with a modest house on River Street, three blocks west of downtown West Point. I'd met both of them in October, 2002, during my brief stop at the Senior Center here. The couple is involved in the county historical society and Louis - whose nickname is "Bud" - had worked most of his adult life at the rendering plant in West Point.
My very pleasant surprise as I stepped into the house? Bud had invited to the interview Clifford L. ("Cliff") Johnson, the man who had co-owned the West Point rendering plant for so many years, the man who'd been Bud's boss. Cliff is ninety years old, he's not as strong as he used to be, but his mind is sharp and he can tell a good story. Bud is seventy-eight years old, and can tell a story too. Mabel is seventy-three.
I got two hours of wonderful talk on tape. After the tape recorder was turned off, all of us sat talking for another hour and a half and then - since suppertime was fast approaching - the only polite thing for me to do was get the hell out of their house so they could make themselves some supper.
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Bud has worked hard all his life. He hired out on farms during his school years. In those days he worked for seventy-five cents a day, until one farmer thought he was doing a good enough job that the rate of pay was increased to a dollar a day. Those were tough years, the Depression, and people depended on each other, Bud said. His family always had food, Bud recalled, but he said he could probably have eaten another potato or two. The family kept a garden in those dry years, Bud said, watering it with buckets hand-pumped from the well.
Bud worked on farms, he drove truck for several months, he served in the Navy, and he worked at the rendering plant in Pendar, Nebraska, until he got a job offer from the rendering plant in West Point, Cliff's plant. Bud served in the Navy and he lived for months on one of those landing craft we know from all World War II footage - an open-topped, steel container eight feet wide, thirty six feet long, with two diesel engines on one end, the other end flopped down onto the beach so the dog-face soldiers could disembark, often into the teeth of the enemy's defense. Yes, Bud put the soldiers to shore on D-Day. Then soon enough he and his mates were ashore themselves, they had to trade their Navy uniforms for Army colors because the higher-ups didn't want everyone to know how far from water these Navy fellows were fighting. Bud survived the war, he made it home to marry Mabel, whom he'd met in Pendar where she waited tables at a restaurant.
Mabel was one of eight children born to a couple who lived on a farm that had been homesteaded by Mabel's grandparents or great-grandparents. Times were tough enough - Mabel was not allowed to go to high school; because her parents hadn't been able to send her four older sisters to high school, they couldn't send her. She regrets that she hadn't been able to get the schooling, she had wanted to be a teacher. Instead, she went to work as a hired girl for farm families in the area that needed an extra set of hands in the house. Someone told her about an opening for a waitress at the restaurant in Pendar, she applied for the job and got it. She had to get it, so she could meet Bud there, so she could marry him and have a family, a son and a daughter who still live in Pendar. Eventually she ran the restaurant in Pendar, even for several years after Bud started working in West Point some eighteen miles to the south. Eventually, as the children were getting older, Mabel realized she didn't have much time to spend with them. Restaurant work will consume your life. And the building that housed the restaurant was going to need an awful lot of work if it was to meet modern restaurant code. So Mabel gave up the restaurant, she and Bud and the family moved to West Point, they've been here ever since. She worked for many years at a drug store in West Point, she worked as a waitress for a while after she was injured and couldn't get her drug-store job back.
For the interview Bud dressed in bib overalls; you'd know that he had been a working man, a man who worked with his hands. Cliff Johnson was the boss, for the interview he dressed in slacks, not overalls; his shirt was of a little finer weave. But listening to Bud and Cliff talk, you recognize that Cliff is not the sort of fellow to ask his employees to do anything he would not do himself. Bud told me as much after Cliff had left. Cliff himself attributed ninety percent of his success in business to the fellows who worked for him; he credited Bud and two other men as keys to making his West Point rendering plant successful. Cliff made a success of himself despite having a hard beginning. He didn't know his father, who ran off. His mother died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. He was raised by his grandparents in Oakland, Nebraska.
Finally at his father's death, an uncle gave Cliff information about his father, that he had died in New Mexico. Cliff sent flowers to the funeral home and signed the card "Son, Clifford." The half-siblings in New Mexico that Cliff didn't know about, they didn't know about Cliff. "Son, Clifford - who's that?" they asked. Clifford was just as surprised as they were. Later, on a trip through New Mexico, Cliff stopped to visit a half-sister. He knew the woman's address. He rang the doorbell. A woman answered. She stepped backwards in shock. She said, "You don't have to tell me who you are. You look just like your father."
Later Cliff found out that he had a couple more half-siblings in California, and he heard he had a couple more in Nebraska whom he never met. His father was a rolling stone, a kind of Johnny Appleseed leaving a trail of children along the way.
Cliff learned to work hard. He married in 1931 during the fury of the Depression. In 1935 he bought a truck and started his own successful business hauling dead animals to a rendering plant. After a year he sold that truck and route, bought another truck, found another territory, and prospered at it. Eventually he found a partner and they established the West Point rendering plant, which prospered under Cliff's guidance, then his son took over the business and ran it until the plant was sold to a fellow from Omaha, who sold it to the conglomerate that shut it down recently.
Why, as a young fellow, would you choose the disagreeable work of operating a rendering truck? "In the Depression, you took what work you could get," Cliff told me. "You might be doing one thing today, tomorrow a fellow might call you to go pick up dead animals and haul them to a rendering plant. I learned from doing it that it was not such a bad line of work."
What does a rendering plant do? It takes dead animals that have been hauled off the farm in various states of ripeness and turns them into pet food or feed meal. The fellow who drove a rendering truck worked for himself. He picked up dead farm animals across his territory and took them to a rendering plant, he got paid per hundred weight of carcass he hauled in.
Who doesn't know what I'm talking about here? A cow dies on a hot July Saturday morning and "cooks" in the sun until Monday when the rendering truck arrives to pick it up and haul it away. The carcass cooks and bloats and gurgles and stinks, and the fellow with the rendering truck hooks a cable around the spongy cow and winches it up into the box of the truck. The dead cow farts and groans as it is moved and pulled into the truck, as liquid drips from its nose. Once the cow is up in the truck, the driver unhooks the cable, he'll need it again down the road, there's another farm, another dead cow or dead hog or dead horse that will have to be winched up into the truck.
This is tough work if you are not used to it. It is tough work even if you're used to it. The smell of death will gag you if you aren't accustomed to it, sometimes it gags you even when you're used to it. The sight of flies crawling in and out of nose holes. The baked glaze of the dead cow's unseeing eye. It is tough work, yet work that must be done. Honorable work that the rest of us would rather not think about.
The driver hauls his ripe cartage to the rendering plant where it gets unloaded. Dead cows and calves have to be skinned before the carcasses are turned into meal. Sheep have to be skinned.
Bud and Cliff were a team skinning cows at the West Point rendering plant. Cliff would always start at one end of the cow, skinning, and Bud would start at the other, and they could do the job start to finish in four minutes. Four minutes from the first slice into the skin til the carcass was naked as a steak in the meat counter. Nobody much liked skinning sheep because it was hard getting the knife blade down through the wool to make a cut, so Bud skinned most of the sheep that came into the plant. He could skin a sheep by himself in three minutes, a calf in two minutes. Cow and calf skins were salted and saved, to be tanned for leather.
The carcass gets cut into manageable chunks so it can be put into the cooker. A hog will get quartered, for instance, and tossed along with pieces of cow, horse, sheep, into a huge pressure cooker. The heat reduces the fat and much of the grease is siphoned off during cooking. Both grease and moisture get cooked out of the meat; as that happens, the meat becomes powdery. A good operator can tell by how the cooked meat feels when it is ready for pressing. Pressing squeezes the very last grease out of the meat. The result is a cake that can be put into the hammermill and turned to meal that is sold to manufacturers who make chicken feed and hog feed mainly. The protein content of the meal coming out of the West Point rendering plant was always about 50%, which was higher than competitors' meal; West Point paid attention to the mix of carcasses going into the cooker, and squeezed out more of the grease.
What happens to the grease? Most of the grease is sold to soap-makers and goes into soap like that you use to wash your face, Cliff and Bud told me.
Rather than being cooked down for meal, the fresher dead animals would be boned and cut up for pet food. After I'd turned off the tape recorder, Cliff told about the time he was called to Washington to testify about the proper labeling of meat scraps from rendering plants, scraps that were meant to be pet food but ended up being fed to humans. All across a swath of the middle part of the continent, from Canada down to Texas, Cliff had investigated what was happening to meat that was supposed to be dog food, and he had gathered signed affidavits from people who knew what was happening to the meat - some boned meat from some rendering plants was ending up on human tables, not in dog bowls, and Cliff was not happy about it. He could understand how people got away with it: take the labels off a can of stew meat and a can of dog food you might not be able to tell which is which. Cliff's evidence and his testimony helped get legislation for tougher labeling of such meat - "Not For Human Consumption."
So - how do you deal with the aspects of the work that most people consider disgusting?
"I know there are people who will tell you," Bud said, "that out at the rendering plant we'd sit on bloated carcasses to eat our lunch. That is not true. We never did that."
"The smell?" said Cliff. "You could smell it but it got so you didn't notice it."
"Cleanliness," Bud said. "Cliff insisted we keep a clean plant. When the day's work was done, we'd scrub down the floors with a tough soap. Cliff bought brooms twenty-four at a time. We'd clean everything off the floor, scrub it down with soap, we'd let the soap sit for a while, then we'd rinse it off with our hot water hoses, we'd run water and steam from the cookers together through our hoses to wash off the soap."
The state, too, was concerned about cleanliness and disease and at one point sent an inspector to check the plant. "What do you scrub up with?" the fellow wanted to know. Bud showed him the barrel of the caustic soap. "Open the barrel," the inspector said, and Bud did, and the fellow was going to put his hand down into the barrel. Bud stopped him. "You don't want to do that," he'd said. "If you put your hand in there you won't have a hand to pull back out." At that point, just the vapors rising from the barrel were enough to convince the inspector that the West Point rendering plant ran a clean ship.
It was not all grim reality at the rendering plant. The fellows enjoyed working with each other. Cliff had a sense of humor; Bud tells a story on him. A call came in from a farmer. He had a mule down that wouldn't get up. Would Cliff send a fellow out to shoot the mule and haul away the carcass? The fellow who went out for the mule came back without it. "When I send you out for a mule, I expect you to bring a mule back," Cliff berated the fellow. The driver tried to explain. He said sure enough the mule was down. He had backed his truck up to the mule, he'd dumped the end-gate of the truck down for loading, and the noise of the chain on metal spooked the mule which got up and ran away before the fellow could shoot it. "Next time," Cliff had said with mock sternness, "shoot the mule before you let the end-gate down."
That's probably good advice for life as well as for the rendering business: "Shoot the mule before you let the end-gate down."
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TOGETHER AGAIN
JUNE 21, 2002
APRIL 20, 2005 CONT'D - (28)
JUNE 20, 2002
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MONDAY, JUNE 9, 2008
MONDAY, JUNE 9, 2008