My Bologna Has a First Name

Teachers affect eternity; no one can tell where their influence stops. – Henry Brooks Adams

Today is Saturday. This past Tuesday, Dad drew his final breath. We knew the day was coming. Dementia progresses almost predictably and rains no mercy. As hard as Tuesday was, we had fair warning. But this new, unexpected emptiness is terrifying, barely explainable. I’ve been battling this world for well over half a century, but always knew if I needed anything I could call Dad and he would drop everything. Even this past year, I could at least hear his voice for a minute before he laid the phone down and walked away, having forgotten who he was talking to or what we were discussing. Even that brief comfort, no more.

As my siblings and I sat around with Mom this week sharing stories, some hilarious and unbelievable, there is one satchel of memories that keeps flooding my consciousness over and over and over. It can be summed up in this one small phrase – my Dad took me to work. I feel so strongly this single act of letting his boy tag along with him for twelve to fourteen hours at a time gave me more leverage and taught me more about what it means to provide value to your employer than all my years of education and experience combined. And it just might be the recollection I lean on now that he is gone and no longer a phone call away.

In 1970 I was five and Dad had moved our family from Los Angeles to the new smog-free and evergreen laced world of the pubescent urban frontier of Atlanta. He had landed a job through a friend at the regional shipping terminal of the Oscar Mayer meat company. At first he worked in the warehouse itself on the night shift, loading trucks for the next day’s delivery routes. It wasn’t long before he was given one of those routes as a driver. For the next ten years he drove a light duty container truck with a freezer compressor attached above the cab and a large image of an Oscar Mayer wiener package adhered to the side. Day after day he cast a web of bologna and hot dogs across the state. And a handful of times while I was out of school for the summer, he would take me with him so we could hang out and I could see firsthand his daily life.

These days when I try to tell someone my father had a decade-long gig with Oscar Mayer, they usually crack the same paltry joke accompanied with a snide grin. “Did he drive the Wiener Mobile?” In case you never heard of it, this vehicle (pronounced like the city in Alabama) was sort of a giant interstate mascot shaped as, you might have guessed, a long hot dog resting in a bun and traversing the country on wheels. Go ahead, Google it. “Ha ha”, says my face, like its the first time I’ve heard that tease. But my inner reprobate wants to hand out a tongue lashing. No, my dad was not a silly cheerleader for processed meat parading around in a giant rolling sausage. I learned on those trips with him his role was much more like a dock worker than a celebrity.

A lot of the details are still extremely clear. We would show up to the shipping warehouse before daylight and he would introduce me to his colleagues like I was the guest of honor at a banquet. The large facility was literally a gigantic freezer, noisy from the loud frigid-air conditioners, and was crisscrossed with aluminum ladder-shaped conveyor devices with wheels that allowed the meat boxes to roll from one place to another. I still recall the powerful smell of cardboard and tons of frozen, processed meat. After a few minutes of gathering up his delivery bills, we would head outside to his truck, which had been loaded the night before.

To a young squirt who could barely ride a bike, his truck was overwhelming. The ladder-like steps up to the seat were so tall it took all of my minuscule strength to climb up and into the cab. Inside was all business, nothing extra but an AM radio. The seat was a huge, flat slab of vinyl with no seams and when I sat down my feet dangled below me. There was no air conditioning other than the door windows, operated by large rotating levers which were difficult for me to turn. But thankfully I could open the smaller, triangular-shaped glass vents adjacent to the enormous rear view mirrors. If I leaned forward far enough I could see my reflection, a tiny passenger in a giant vessel. The steering wheel was as big as a bicycle wheel turned on it’s side and Dad had to lean over it and turn it like he was navigating a fire truck. The gear shift lever, a tall mysterious metal wand with a worn, hieroglyphic-etched gear pattern on the knob, was fastened to the floorboard. This device was a daylong workout for Dad’s huge forearm, as he shifted back and forth while we climbed and descended the hills, sometimes with difficulty and stubborn grinding, making the engine hum with a melodic growl. We sat way up high off the street, looking down at all the other cars, a new perspective for a kid who’d only experienced highway travel from the backseat of a station wagon. But the most overpowering sensory surprise was the constant smell of diesel fuel. Those fumes combined with all the metal and grinding and whirring engine made it seem like we were rolling through the streets of Atlanta in a tank. It was simultaneously exciting and terrorizing.

Some of the routes were in the city, close to each other, and required lots of tight maneuvers and backing up into loading zones. It was fun to watch the buildings get closer and closer in the large mirror until the truck touched the dock bumpers. Dad seemed to have no problems putting that behemoth of metal and lunch meat into the tiniest of spaces. Other days we had to cover many miles and towns. I remember my Dad teaching me on those longer trips how to identify all the various cars on the road. “Just remember a ’57 Chevy has the long tails fins, but the ’55 and ’56 models have the shorter ones.” Cars were one of his passions and we had fun with this road game. “Okay, how about that 2-door over there with the swooped rear window?” “Um, a Torino?” “No, that’s a good guess, but see the front only has two headlights so its a Barracuda. The Torino has four headlights.” If nothing else, this taught me to pay extremely close attention to details. That’s a skill I use every single day in my career. I remember one day we decided to count all the Volkswagen Beetles we saw on the road – a modified “punch bug” game without the shoulder bruising. I remember we got up to somewhere above fifty, a result of the oil embargo I’m certain.

Unloading the contents of the truck at the various food merchants was a fascinating chore. First we had to put on coat and gloves. Dad would then study his delivery bills for that stop, open the rear roll-up door and lift me up into the freezer and start telling me which boxes he would need. All the meat boxes were bright white cardboard, not brown. Pork meats had red lettering and blue indicated beef. Most of them were light enough that I could find and hand over to Dad. What amazes me to this day is he had to get this entire truckload delivered by the end of the day. So he didn’t just wait for me to throw him the entire inventory for that stop. He was multi-tasking: pulling down boxes and stacking them on a hand truck while at the same time calling out to me, “We need two of the blue 2032’s and one of the red 1604’s.” He was also making sure I wasn’t hurt. I have no recollection of ever being in danger while on one of these excursions. In those days, we didn’t wear bicycle helmets or seat belts. So reaching for boxes and slipping around on the back of a wet, metal truck five feet off the asphalt was nothing to worry about apparently.

For some reason we also delivered bright green 5-gallon buckets of Claussen pickles to many stops. Those were obviously too hefty for me. Once he was satisfied we had loaded the requisite list for the stop, Dad would push the hand truck stacked with boxes using one hand, and then carry two of the pickle buckets with the other. To my young imagination, he could probably do just about anything.

Once we arrived in the back of the stores with our deliveries I felt like I was in a secret world unknown to most kids. Going to the grocer with your Mom to pick out cereal was always fun, of course. But being in the back of the store where the butchers cut up the meats, the boxes were broken down and stacked and the time clocks punched was an exotic world. Dad was all smiles. He greeted the store managers by their first names, no matter their ethnicity, like they were long lost friends even though he had seen them recently on the last delivery. They would catch up on their families and chat like brothers – this was still primarily a man’s world. “I see you have some help today, Lloyd.” “Yes sir, this is my oldest son!” he would say beaming with pride.

Across the state this routine would be played out over and over throughout the day. No time to stop and sit for lunch so it was eaten on the road. At some point late in the afternoon the sound of the wheels whining down the highway would lull me to sleep and I would end up lying flat on the big bench seat. If Dad had a delivery stop while I was zonked, he didn’t wake me up. After all I wasn’t even ten years old, had gotten out of bed at probably 4:30 am and had helped unload quite a few hot dogs by this time. And he probably saw this as an opportunity to make up some time, knocking out a few stops without his little handicap.

By the time we arrived back home later in the evening, even with the afternoon nap, I was completely wiped out. But Dad did this every day for a large portion of his life. I believe he left home around 5:30am and would arrive home well after we had eaten dinner, maybe 8 or 9pm. He was by any estimate an extremely hard worker…and I saw it first hand. No, he was not perfect. He had as many hangups as the rest of us. But he damn sure tried to be one of the good guys.

At some point, the regional manager realized my Dad’s ability to build relationships with customers was probably selling as much lunch meat as a commissioned rep. They offered him a sales position with a considerable base pay and a company car. It would mean no more deliveries. No more trucks breaking down on the side of the interstate in the middle of Georgia. No more freezer compressors failing to operate and worrying about getting a truck load of meat back to the warehouse before it ruined. But to no one’s surprise, Dad flat out turned them down. His identity was not tied to climbing a ladder or meeting quotas. You see his friendliness to people was not based on how much they bought from him, it was unconditional. He cared about people simply because they were human. And he never pictured himself anything other than a laborer. Given his 8th grade education and his fatherless childhood, his dignity was found in the fact he worked harder than anyone else to make sure his kids had food, shelter, new clothes for school and maybe – something he could only acquire through theft as a kid – a new bicycle.

After ten years of taking care of his customers, the Hapeville warehouse of Oscar Mayer was closed and Dad’s job was hired out to a third party delivery service. The corporation may have been sold to a larger conglomerate, who knows. But they no longer had to worry about renting warehouse space, truck maintenance or employee benefits. Dad was laid off after we had just moved into a new house in 1980. It took him awhile but he eventually landed with a company driving larger trucks around one of the northern suburbs of Atlanta and he went right back to making all sorts of deliveries. Once he tried to unload a marble tombstone by himself and dropped it on his big toe, causing a near-permanent limp (it eventually healed on its own). But that was him. If he was running behind schedule because of traffic, he didn’t have time to wait on a forklift lackey. He eventually retired from driving in his mid-sixties, entering a normal American stage of life. But only a few years later, his mind started faltering and robbed him of his dignity.

Work is a trade of physical and mental sacrifice in exchange for the means to feed your family. Dad showed me how to hold up my end of the deal. There was no dishonesty, no ungrateful entitlement, no cutting corners…only doing the best to make good on the responsibility for which you’ve been entrusted. He believed if you could create your own value, you would never have to worry about being unemployed. I learned this first hand and it has served me well. Funny though, he didn’t need to use words. His behavior and positivity forged these lessons into my character without a single verbal lecture.

To this day as I stroll through Publix by the lunch meat aisle and I see those Oscar Mayer logos, my mind goes back to those memories. I think about Dad and those summer days I had the opportunity to accompany him…and a huge smile comes across my face. Dad is gone, but his memory and his ethic, will always be here, right where I need them.