The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  The following summer they built a school, and my sister and I started. Learning English was a little difficult, although when you start playing with other kids, you’d be surprised how fast you learn. I never finished seventh grade because the snow melted too soon. I went to school altogether less than five winters.

  There was the booms and the busts, we’d go from one to the other. About 1912, things began to slow down. By 1914, they were pretty bad, until World War One started. We moved out to the country, got a homestead. The government was still giving free land. So we moved out there in the wilderness.

  Father got a job in the logging camp as a blacksmith. Mother did some laundry for the bosses. That helped us a lot that winter. When the big logging camps came in, they brought the railroads. My father had been a miner, a carpenter, a farmer, a common laborer. When a person moves so many times from one year, from one job to another, there’s reasons for it. He wasn’t happy with what he was faced with. When he began reading these papers and talking to people about capitalism and exploitation, he began to see and change his mind.

  I didn’t pay much attention to politics until I was in the neighborhood of thirty. When things got tough in the thirties, I began to express my views. I had a good job then, working for the county. Every morning, the boss’d pick out certain guys and give ’em a day’s work. The guys that didn’t get any work would pass under my window, so we got to talking. Well, they started pointing the finger at me.

  The county commissioner called me into the office and warned me about talkin’ the way I talk. I had my independence, except that it made my livelihood a little more difficult. That’s the way it’s been up to this day, and I don’t think it’ll change. When you’re once fired for your political views, you’re automatically blackballed with the mining companies, even if you never worked for a mining company. The superintendent of the mine was the mayor at one time.

  Your American Dream? You got a terrible-looking hole down in the ground where we used to live once. It’s filled with water, and the wealth is taken out of the land. I don’t know what it’s good for. On the other hand, people live in nice houses, they’re painted well. There’s jobs for those that have jobs, and there are a lot of people on welfare in this county.

  I see a wonderful future for humanity, or the end of it.

  If we continue this present trend, we’re gonna go straight to hell, we’re gonna blow ourselves right off this earth, or we’ll poison ourselves off. It’s up to the people. What bothers me is that they’re not concerned. I don’t know how to approach ’em. For forty-five years I’ve written a letter to the newspaper. I’ve tried to get one every month to at least one paper. That’s the only thing I’m able to do.

  WALLACE RASMUSSEN

  It is 7:00 A.M. A frosty winter morning. The executive offices of Beatrice Foods in Chicago. The long corridors are empty; you walk through as in an Ingmar Bergman dream sequence. You enter a large room; seated at the end of a long table, alone, is the chief executive officer of the corporation. He glances at his pocket watch. There is coffee for himself and his visitor. Big-boned and heavy-set, with calloused hands, he has the appearance of the archetypal elderly workingman in Sunday clothes. He is bluff and genial. He is a winner of the Horatio Alger Award.

  I’m just a country boy. Born in Nebraska and came up right through the Great Depression. I’m convinced it will repeat itself when it’s time, and probably it’ll be good for the country. It will be hard on people who never experienced doing without, but it’s amazing what you can get along without. You don’t have it, so you begin to spend more time with your family. There’s a way in history, a way in nature, of always bringing people back down to earth.

  Some people are more aggressive than others. People are always protecting their turf. That’s a natural instinct. The bull elk on the mountainside, when he bugles, he doesn’t bugle to other bulls. He bugles to them: Stay away from my harem. The male does not fight to be fighting; he fights to protect his territory. You could always tell the survivors because they were always in there punchin’. Takes a lot to get them upset. They would swing with whatever comes along. To me, that’s a survivor.

  Somebody asked me: Did you ever dream of being in the job you’re in? I say no. My only ambition in life was to be just a little bit better off the next day than I was the day before. And to learn a little more than I did the day before. I was always reading. As a child, I read every Popular Mechanics magazine I could get ahold of. Even in school, they would bring me things to fix.

  In those days, each farmer helped the other farmers. At twelve, I hitched the team and hauled bundles of hay and pitched them into the thrashing machine. I upset a load of bundles by turning too sharply. I went across the ditch. Do you think those farmers would help me? Let’s see if he could do it by himself. It was a good lesson because I never upset another one.

  I learned the traits of human beings. You can learn from nature why people do what they do. I’m talking about wildlife. I spent my entire life doing some hunting, out of necessity for food on the table. You learn that animals and people have the same habits today that they had two thousand years ago.

  I never wanted to be a loser. I always wanted to be the first one off the airplane. I have a theory that when you walk through a crowd in the airport—I don’t care how crowded it is—if you look fifty feet ahead, people will separate. Don’t look straight at the person, and people will make room for you. Years ago, I took my wife to Tulsa. I was ready to get on the airplane when the fellow said: “Don’t you have your wife with you?” I said: “Oh, my gosh, yes.” I forgot her. [Laughs.] People would say they saw me on the street and I didn’t say hello. I was thinking about something else. It isn’t my nature to be friendly.

  I think hardship is necessary for life to be good, for you to enjoy it. If you don’t know hardship, you don’t know when you have it good. Today, the father and mother don’t want their children to go through the same hardships. I don’t look at it that way. I have two children. One is forty and one is thirty-six. I can still say, “This is what you do,” and that’s what they do. I’m a firm believer that they had to know things weren’t always that easy. There’s a price you pay for everything.

  People are now so used to being given something for nothing. They think it’s for nothing, but there’s a price. Loss of their pride, loss of their ability to take care of themselves. It’s like caging animals. I don’t care how wild the animal was, if you cage him long enough, he forgets how to take care of himself. The same is true about human beings. Like a lion that’s forgotten how to take care of himself, they will kill others, the slow ones because they can’t catch the fast ones. That’s why you have crime today in the element not employed. They don’t know how to take care of themselves other than to take away from those that have. A recession or a revolution will bring it back into balance. It’s happened throughout history. That’s one thing I know out of reading history.

  It comes down to—who’s gonna be the survivor? It will test the strength of a lot of people. It will be every community for itself. You cannot stand still. You grow or die.

  When I left home, I went to California. I had odd jobs delivering handbills. Oh, did I learn a lesson! I couldn’t figure out why some of them would deliver a thousand in a couple of hours when it took me all day. I followed one and saw he was putting most of them down the storm drain. I went to the fellow I was working for and asked how come he was allowing him to put them down the storm drain. I put mine all out, I’m wearin’ out my shoe leather. For ten cents a day. I could buy a bucket of grapes for ten cents, that was enough to eat. He says: “We expect that.” I said: “It’s not right.” He said: “We’re not gonna pay you any more.” So I quit the job. You had to be brave to quit jobs that paid ten cents a day. [Laughs.] I think he was rippin’ people off. California was then known as the place to do unto others before they do unto you.

  I worked three months on an alfalfa ranch at ten dollars a month, room
and board. All you’d get was black-eyed peas for breakfast, for dinner, and for supper. The milk was always sour. They gave me a letter that they owed me twenty dollars to take to the owner of the ranch, and he’d pay me. Dumb me, I gave him the letter and I never got my twenty dollars. That was a lesson to me. Trust everybody with reservations.

  I came back to Nebraska and helped shuck corn. We sold it at ten cents a bushel and burned the rest of it. Then I got a job putting cedar chests together. I never told anybody I couldn’t do anything. The company failed, so I got a job cutting out jigsaw puzzles. I got ten cents for each one.

  I was reading about people who were successful and how they did it. How they got ahead. That was basically all my reading. I made up my mind that if I ever got with a big company, I’d never leave. My mother’s brother was an engineer at Beatrice in Lincoln. I got a job there. I was nineteen. I started pulling ice out of a tank. You pull up 400-pound cans with an electric hoist. There was always a challenge: How much could I pull? The maximum was a hundred tons. I always wanted to go over that. The engineer would come in and say: “Slow down.” [Laughs.]

  I kept all the equipment up myself. I didn’t want anybody fooling with it. The chief engineer recognized I had mechanical ability. He said: “Do you think you could handle maintenance in the creamery?” I said: “Sure.” [Laughs.] I knew what a creamery looked like. I’d walked through it a couple of times, but that’s all. I’d never seen any pasteurizing equipment in my life. But it didn’t take me long to learn. I never doubted that anything I intended to do, I could do.

  In six months I went to the chief engineer and said: “I don’t have enough to do.” He said the other man worked at it full-time. I said: “I don’t care. You gotta get me something else to do.” I wanted to keep busy. So I went to the dairy side, where they bottle milk. I learned a lot from the fellow there, a fine machinist and refrigeration man. Anybody who had information, I would soak it up like a sponge.

  It got so, I took care of all the maintenance in the dairy and creamery. I went to him again and said: “I’m running out of something to do.” He said: “Why don’t you go over to the ice cream plant?” Soon I was taking care of all three. It wasn’t enough of a challenge, so I got a job at night, taking care of the air conditioning of a hotel. I also did home wiring. I would require only two, three hours of sleep.

  Beatrice offered me the job as chief engineer of the plant in Vincennes, Indiana. It was the largest milk plant in the country. I was twenty-two. The people who were working there were in their forties and fifties, some of them in their sixties. I thought maybe there might be some resentment because of my age. I tried to be tolerant of people’s weaknesses, knowing I’d get the maximum amount of work out of them if I treated them with respect.

  The man whose place I was supposed to take wasn’t capable of handling the job. He was a genius with equipment, but a tinkerer. Say you had a body on the table and it’s bleeding to death. The doctor would say: “What kind of car accident was he in?” This fellow would always make an analysis. Consequently, he had four or five people standing around doing nothing. My theory was: Let’s get it fixed, then we’ll analyze why it broke down.

  I finally told the management he’s gotta go. That was the first time I knowingly practiced brinkmanship. I needed that job like you need shoes in cold weather. I knew they needed me worse than I needed them. I stayed in my room for two weeks. They called me and said: “He’s gone, come on back.” From then on, we got the plant in shape.

  I worked out of the Chicago office drawing layouts. I had no experience in this. I bought books, started reading, and got the equipment. I told the engineers we have today that I could tear a piece of refrigeration equipment down with a suit on and never get greasy. They don’t ever tear them down themselves. If you’re going to direct people, you must have knowledge of the job. If somebody comes in and says this is so, I know immediately whether that person is telling me a fact. Facts in your hands before you make the decision, that’s part of the survivor.

  Another lesson I pass on: Whenever you’re going to work for somebody, make sure that you make him successful. Otherwise, you must jump over him. Now, I’ve had to jump over... [He trails off.]

  I always considered that as part of life. This is our world. If we’re going to keep it a strong society, you have to have strong leaders. You can’t have what we have in Washington today.

  He refers, wryly, to a profile of himself in Forbes magazine. “The only thing they said unfair is this last sentence: ‘That is a tough and determined man. Even though he’s pushing sixty-five, he doesn’t allow anybody to do to Wallace Rasmussen what he has done to others.’ ”

  It can appear to be ruthless at the time that you do it. When someone is not producing in a corporation, or even in a family, and he doesn’t recognize he’s holding up the works, someone has to make that decision for him. If you’re going to be successful, you can’t let any person stand in the way. The company is a hundred thousand people and fifty thousand shareholders. We have a moral responsibility to at least a hundred fifty thousand individuals. Multiply a hundred fifty by three and a half, which is the population of the average family, and you got half a million people. We have a responsibility to those who trust us.

  You are respected by a hundred thousand employees. Are you feared, too?

  [A long, long pause. ] You’d rather not say that it was fear, but you have it. You can’t help it. Some of it may be awe. Ninety-nine percent of it has to be respect. You have all three. I make it a habit of talking to the most junior person in the office. I find out more from him than I do from the senior officers. [Laughs.] Senior officers try to cover up their mistakes. Poor little junior down here doesn’t know he’s making mistakes, so I find out more.

  When the company was 4.3 billion dollars, I wasn’t chairman, I wasn’t president, I wasn’t executive vice-president. I was a senior vice-president and I had three-fourths of the company as my load. This goes back to ‘68, ’67.

  I became president and chief executive officer on July 1, 1976. In those two years, we have grown from 5.2 billion to 7.4 billion. No, no, you absolutely cannot stop your growth. You must increase enough to keep people interested in investing in your company.

  There’s many people asking: When are you going to retire? I made a comment when I took the job. I would go out when I had eight billion. Now I say I’ll go when it’s ten.

  POSTSCRIPT

  He was retired in 1975 as chief executive officer of Beatrice Foods. The company had reached 7.8 billion dollars.

  VERNON JARRETT

  He is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

  I grew up in Paris, Tennessee. People in small towns considered nowhere identified with somewhere. So we were thirty miles from Murray, Kentucky, sixty miles from Paducah, a hundred ten miles from Nashville, forty miles from Clarksville. We were on the L & N Railroad.

  Louisville and Nashville used to come down from Chicago. It would be about two city blocks from my house. We were always train-conscious. We used to listen for the train, set your clock by it. You’d say: “Panama’s late today. Number 619 is late.” The engineer would blow his whistle, the people would listen, the dogs would howl.

  Country people used to go walking on Sunday afternoons. They go down to the depot to see who’s comin’ in and who’s leavin’. Or just to see the train comin’ in. The trains always symbolized mobility. Somebody goin’ somewhere, somebody leavin’. We were always aware there was another place outside of this. Somewhere. That you could go somewhere.

  When I was a little kid, we used to play a game called swinging, with a car tire and a tree. One would push and one would be the conductor. You’d call off the cities: Paducah. St. Louis. Evansville. Somebody’d say: “I think I’m gonna get off here.” And somebody’d say: ‘Naw, I’m gonna wait.” And then everybody would say:”Chicago! Forty-seventh Street!” Listen to a lot of the old blues songs: “How Long, Baby, Has That Evenin’ Train Been Gone?” “G
oing to Chicago.” “Trouble in Mind.”

  Some of the pictures stand out in my mind right now. People chopping cotton. I used to wander around in the woods, workin’ on a sweet-potato patch. When they’d hear the train coming, you’d see ’em standing there, with their hoes or their forks. Like, we’d pay our respects now, the train is comin’ by. You’d see that look on their faces, that longing look. You might see folks in bandanas, overalls, older women, young people. They’d all stop in the middle of what they were doin’ and they’d wave at the train, waving at anonymous people and maybe anonymous dreams.

  In some parts of Mississippi it was a little rough because you had to sneak away. I learned from people who lived on the plantations, where you still had peonage, there was always that train. If push came to shove, you could go. If you lived in those little delta towns, the train was the symbol of where you could go to reclaim yourself as a man or become a woman.

  We called ourselves a part of that Illinois Central. The tracks that began somewhere in Louisiana went all the way to Chicago. Chicago even has a different pronunciation. Chicago. These trains were always gonna take you somewhere. They used to have excursions, too. Where you could at least say you’d been there, to the Promised Land. Weekend excursions even to St. Louis. St. Louis was one of those places we black folks called Negro Heavens. There was a movie made once that we stood in line to see when I was a kid in grammar school called Harlem Heaven. Bill Bojangles Robinson, the first time I ever saw him. They played it in our high school. It was farmed out and sold to schools and churches. You got to see Harlem. You’d even settle for Detroit. People in Alabama went to “Detroit City.” They heard about those jobs with Henry Ford. Of course, for us in Mississippi, Alabama, parts of Georgia, Arkansas, Chicago was our heaven. Understand?