Published: January 28, 2008 12:11 am            

The Off Season: Standing on the shoulders of hard workers

TERRE HAUTE — Part of my routine each workday morning includes a stop in town for a big mug of coffee before heading on to work. I’m not talking an espresso con panna with extra whipped cream at a trendy glass-encased, soft jazz-enveloped franchise shop here. I take a double dose of coal black Joe — hold the cream and sugar — in my well-worn travel cup at the corner Red and White grocery in Rosedale.

Sometime before 7, I pull up to the curb, walk in the side door, toss a few coins on the counter and grab my brew. Either Billie or Sue is there to say hello, and we usually trade a few words about the weather. But they’re always busy, and I’m always on the go, so more often than not they wish my back a good day as I finish my run through their morning in less than a minute.

On most days I also walk past another customer or two. The men who sit at the store’s kitchen tables that early aren’t gabbing in the usual early shift roundtable that most assuredly meets in just about all tiny Indiana towns on cold January mornings. These men are most often sitting there with a cup of steaming hot coffee and a plate of warm biscuits and gravy in front of them, contemplating a day of work outside, hard work like driving nails and shoveling gravel and lifting and pulling and digging.

They wear their thick rough overalls like space suits, a pair of work gloves stuffed into a rear pocket, their insulated caps sitting on a chair next to them, their faces weathered and wind-blown. They’re men who make a living working in the rain and the cold, and they begin their days in the dark hours before most folks have yet to crawl out of their toasty beds.

I don’t think we appreciate the efforts of men and women like these early-morning laborers and donut makers I see each day. Too many of us now think it’s below us to work for a living, let alone work hard. Oh, I know most people collecting a paycheck work for it; I feel I do, and I believe I earn what I’m paid. But I also know that my dad and his dad could have worked me into the ground in their day. My mom and my grandmother could have done it too.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with my big brother on the telephone, and as it normally does, our conversation turned to family stories. He said he meant to ask me a month ago if I ever knew just how far my grandfather and grandmother had made it in school. We weren’t sure, but collectively thought they’d both finished the eighth grade or so but had quit after that to go to work. My mom’s stepdad — the grandfather I knew on her side of the family since her real father died at 38 after years spent in the coal mines-quit after the sixth grade, but I seriously doubt if the man missed a day of work until he walked out of the meat-packing business he worked at for his too-brief two years of retirement. To my knowledge, the only workdays he ever spent without a white apron tied about his waist was just after the infamous explosion at the Home Packing plant; it nearly killed him.

There’s much in the news these days about good American jobs, jobs that rely on technology and college degrees, white-collar jobs. I have nothing but respect for work of that nature. I preach education to my own kids and to those in my classroom, but I hope they never feel that I have lost respect for hard labor, or that they should ever think that it’s below their dignity to work at jobs that require elbow grease and calluses or dust pans and washrags.

My grandfather dug ditches, tarred roads, and dipped enameled pots; my grandmother canned a garden’s worth of food every summer, mended every sock and shirt and pair of pants they ever owned, and sacked potatoes for Christmas money. My dad poured acres of concrete and hammered ten-pennies and framed houses; my mom stood behind a drugstore soda fountain, labored as a grade school cafeteria cook, and made an awful lot of clothes from scratch. My wife’s dad grew up shoveling corn by the truckload, fixed television sets in the dark hours after he’d planted his fields, overhauled his own tractors, and fenced every inch of his own property. Her mom can make a great meal out of nothing and that came from experience growing up without much of anything.

Both sets of parents-mine gone now, my wife’s still with us-earned everything they had or have. They, to paraphrase a long-forgotten television ad, did it the old-fashioned way: They earned it. And, so do those I see stocking store shelves and running cash registers and mopping school floors and doing a myriad of other chores that might not require a college education, but are important nonetheless.

Before I hung up the phone with my brother the other night, he mentioned that I was the first person in our family to get a college education, and that I should be proud of that. I am proud. I’m proud that a family of hard workers, my brother included-and I know my wife feels the very same way about her family-saw to it that I had a life that enabled me to go to college and have a job where my hands stay clean and my back’s not broken because of it.

There’s no doubt about it: High-tech jobs are important to the future of this country. But don’t underestimate the folks who have sawdust in their hair or a broom in their hands.

You can contact Mike Lunsford at hickory913@

aol.com, or by regular mail C/O the Tribune-Star, PO Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808.

        

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