A little reminiscing inspired by the 100th anniversary of an iconic tractor.
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Some folks may think that because I play classical guitar and write a blog and all, that I’m a sensitive kinda guy. What they don’t realize is that long before I became a guitar player and began mouthing off online, I was a bulldozer operator. A regular Hoosier redneck, you might say. If that’s ultimately your takeaway from reading this, I’m fine with that.
My older brothers, with help from dad, started a heavy equipment business in Muncie IN at a time when the city was exploding with post-war residential and industrial development, and Foster & Sons Excavating & Crane Rental was there to do the heavy lifting. While I didn’t choose to join my brothers as an adult in the business (drawn away by my desire to be a musician, God help me), I was involved until I’d graduated high school.
Times were different then, and people had much more freedom to live their lives to suit themselves without all the stifling small-business regulations that make life so insufferable today. Family values actually meant something back then, and all the kiddie coddling we see today just didn’t happen. I suppose there were some kind of child labor laws in effect at the time, but nobody paid them much attention here in Indiana. If a family had a small business, kids were expected to help out, whether it was farming or, in our case, the heavy equipment biz. Kids learned early how to assess and manage real-world risks. Nowadays, since safe spaces are all the rage, kids have to create their own risks with opioids, binge drinking and such. A sad and piss-poor substitute in my estimation.
Many of my earliest childhood memories include being taken out on job sites by my dad and brothers, where I’d be put to work fetching cables and tools, fueling machines, crawling around in the innards of big cranes pumping fittings full of grease, holding the elevation stick as dad peered through his transit, establishing the grade, and so forth. Any week day I wasn’t in school or the family on vacation, I was on-site somewhere, doing my day gig, and learning the family trade.
BTW, my starting pay was 25 cents an hour,
which I thought was pretty cool at the time.
Once my legs were long enough to reach the brake pedals, I would generally find myself in the seat of a Caterpillar bulldozer, moving hills around, digging and filling mammoth holes, running a front-end loader to fill tandem dump trucks, and generally transforming terrain as only a bulldozer operator can. I was maybe 9-10 years of age, I guess.
I can still recall coaxing alive the small gasoline-powered starter engine on cold mornings, which was responsible for turning over the big main engine and getting it going. Then the sweet smell of diesel exhaust when the engine was bearing down under the load of moving several yards of earth at once.
I remember when taking a shower was something you did after you got home from work, not before you left for work in the morning.
Now, I can’t say I romanticized my job as a bulldozer operator much when I was actually doing it. I was very young and, like all kids, naturally lazy, and would just as soon have been home playing my first chords on my old Silvertone acoustic. Nonetheless, I was smart enough to realize that learning to do a man’s job at such a tender age had certain advantages. For one, I was making good money for my age, and got raises as my skills accrued. I got to learn a valuable trade under the watchful and kind tutelage of my older brothers, both of whom I love and admire no end.
And perhaps chiefly, by spending my summers and off days in the company of adult working men, I matured, it seemed to me, faster than my peers. I remember often looking at some of the juvenile behavior my school chums exhibited, shaking my head in wonder that they had acquired no more common sense than that. And to be honest, as I look at the world today, I’m still shaking my head, and for similar reasons.
Was I robbed of my childhood, as some hand-wringing nanny-state smother-mother would suggest? Was I placed at unnecessary risk, for instance, when as a minor child I was given an express trip off the top of a six-story building, dangling from a 1″ crane cable high above the pavement, straddling the iron drop ball firmly between my legs and gripping the cable with impressive concentration, as my brother smiled up at me and took his foot off the brake to treat me to an exhilarating free-fall for a few seconds… until he expertly feathered the brake again, gently slowing my precipitous descent to a soft landing?
In short — was I an exploited child? Not as I see it. To this day, I’ve met only one other man (other than my eldest nephew, who unlike me actually became a professional crane operator) who had the same unique upbringing I had, and once we discovered that fact, had a grand time reminiscing about the good old days. One man’s exploitation is another man’s blessing… it all depends on how you want to look at it.
While I suppose today’s stringent child labor laws serve a purpose, they also scuttled a few worthy long-standing traditions — including kids following in the trades of their parents, learning from the school of hard knocks. This sort of talk has become sooo 20th century, I know. Be that as it may… I believe we’ve lost more than we’ve gained by trying to take all the risk out of the lives of our youth.
Foster & Sons were in business for forty-five years before my brothers sold off all the cranes, bulldozers, graders, rollers, loaders, trucks and trailers, and retired. They had moved literal mountains of machinery, installing industrial components weighting 60 tons or more, and in the end had built and/or demolished every single factory in Muncie, not to mention handling countless residential and small business construction projects. And in all those years, Fosters had not a single dropped payload, nor a death, not even a serious work injury.
Well, I did bust my nose real good once on a steel tool box lid… but that was my own damn fault.
