I worked in a service station, as a board-foot estimator for Great Lakes Timber Company, as a life guard, and later as a truck driver for the Union Pacific Railway Trucking line. I saved every penny I could for college. By that time, my mother’s investments paid off, and I no longer needed to support her and my brother. Lacking a father’s advice, I had to figure out where to go to college. I had the grades, but I had no real idea about the costs. Another of my Dad’s old friends said I should apply to Stanford. That sounded great. For one thing, I would be able to get away from my small town and to learn something about the world. So, I applied to Stanford. No one told me that people apply to more than one university. I think they were intrigued by my small townness, and I was accepted.
I loved Stanford. I loved learning. It was everything I ever wanted. The place was about thinking, absorbing great thinking, and making sense out of the wide world about which I was just beginning to learn. I was on one of the first wrestling teams at the university. My fighting days paid off, apparently. I won the Pacific Coast championship in my weight class. My teammates—all seven of them—used to taunt me because I was pre-med and studied in between matches. I was determined to be a DAR—look it up. It was early in the recent unpleasantness in Viet Nam. Of the eight of us wrestlers, all of us were eventually drafted. Only two of us survived. Even now, I find it difficult to read my friends’ names on the winding black wall of the Viet Nam Memorial in Washington. Then, I ran out of money. No one would give a kid like me a loan. I don’t think there were student loans then. I came back to Utah, matriculated in the University and achieved DAR status.
I took a sort of sabbatical and spent two years in Canada and Alaska seeing the country and working for my church. I got married as soon as I came home, and my wife and I moved into a $47 a month walk-up. In those days, we used to hear about people being concerned over whether their residences had wall-to-wall carpeting. Vera and I were worried about the fact that we did not have complete wall-to-wall walls. I worked again as dock worker for Union Pacific. The foreman told me I had to join the Teamsters or I couldn’t have the job. I needed the job, but I knew my rights. Utah was a “right-to-work” state, and I did not want to have anything to do with unions. The foreman patiently explained that if he did not make me join the union, both of us would be found dead in a ditch before the week was out. I joined the union. The featherbedders resented me when I was given the first job to drive a supply truck. They came at me with axe handles (remember, they were teamsters). The foreman had had enough of the lazy bums, and he brought me an axe handle. The two of us stood the six feather bedders off. The deal was that I had to fight the guy who had seniority over me and presumed that he should have the better job. He was dumb as a bag of hammers, and a lousy fighter. My school days paid off. I beat him to a convincing pulp. Thereafter, I was treated with grudging respect, and the foreman used to laugh a little every time I ran the gauntlet between the trucks and where the feather bedders were sleeping.
I got into medical school. My job then was to work in Doctorman’s Slaughter House collecting adrenal glands for the endocrine service at the U. Nobody told me what would be involved; so I appeared in the slaughter house office and explained who I was and why I was there. They were expecting me. The foreman was a huge, powerful, no-nonsense, man of few words.
He asked me, “Do you faint, College Boy.”
“No, Sir.”
“Are you quick on your feet?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“You’d better be.”
It became evident why both qualities were important. My job was to stand in the bottom of the hot, wet pit as the cattle passed into the chute. One worker’s job was to hit the beast in the middle of the forehead, kill it; and the next worker attached steel hooks in the animal’s hind legs behind the achilles tendons. Then, it was hoisted onto a moving rack; and two men eviscerated it as I watched intently for two reasons. The first was that the pit was up to my mid-calves in sticky, slippery blood. I had to avoid falling, because I would be likely to fall into rip saws which were constantly moving from animal to animal. I had to avoid fainting for the same reason and because I would probably drown—my wife would never forgive me for such an ignominious passing, one she would not be able to tell her gentle friends about.
The second reason for watching carefully was because now my part in the process came due. The foreman showed me how to find and how to excise the adrenal or suprarenal glands from a moving cow. The belt stopped for no man. I had twenty seconds to locate, to cut out, and to store the fresh adrenals in solvent; so, the researchers at the medical school could get active hormones, enzymes, and the like for their work. The work was relentless. I was working with the toughest guys I ever met. I took to them, and they took to me. That stood me in good stead as I practiced medicine, taking care of all kinds. I learned the language and the way of thinking of working men and was proud to be one. My Dad would have approved.
There is an old song with a verse that reads, “I am a working man, tried and true, I wouldn’t ask you nothin’ I wouldn’t do. Let me tell you about yesterday. You worked right well I am proud to say. Today, we’re gonna work the same as last, ‘cept today, we’re gonna work a little fast.”
At the end of that summer, I learned how to work, how to really work. I also learned that I could hold my head up with any man. That is a lesson well worth learning. I have met many men in my time, many who were bullies of one sort or another, and not a few who threatened me. The lessons of my young life got me through the vicissitudes.
My question this time is, do you really think you should home school your children or send them to an effete private school and deprive them or the rough and tumble education where men-are-men, and women-are-women, and they can learn the hard way the valuable lessons necessary to become one or the other and be able to stand face-to-face with anyone? Such characters people my novels. Do you like that kind of protagonist—do or die types—or would you rather have more Hallmark Movies types. I write about the former, and my novels do not really feature the latter. Are you willing to give them a try?