One of the biggest employers in the area where I grew up as a teenager was the Stokely Van Camp bean processing factory in Frederic, Wisconsin. The work was seasonal because it revolved around planting, picking, cutting and canning green beans harvested from fields in nearby towns. Farmers would contract with Stokely to plant beans on their land. They would get compensated by the number of hoppers of beans cut during summer months.
Steam Cleaning
My first summer job at Stokely was working the night shift in 1977. A handful of rookies like me were taught how to steam clean the machines that sifted and cut the green beans before they got sent by conveyor belt to other locations at the factory. These machines would be working from sunup to sundown, as long as there were beans waiting to be harvested. We wore yellow rain slickers and gloves because we were spraying water from hoses for hours. It was steam that came out of the hoses at high pressure, so we had to be careful not to spray others or contact the hot steam for very long. One machine consisted of a spinning drum of sharp knives. I avoiding being the guy who clean it because you had to get into the drum to clean it. Obviously the power to the machines was turned off while cleaning, but accidents do happen!
Icing
In 1978, I moved up to working the day shift. My job was to fill crates with beans that had just been cut, put ice on them, and help load them into trucks. There were only three of us on my shift. It took some strength to do the work, but it was also outside the factory building, so it was not very noisy and the temperature was nice.
Harvesting
In 1979, I became part of the team that harvested beans in the farm fields. The very first day, we met at the factory in Frederic, Wisconsin and drove a dozen tractors along Highway 35 shoulder to the first field in Centuria, Wisconsin. I was assigned to one of the small, blue-colored tractors. It was a manual three-speed. I had never driven an 3-speed, let alone a tractor! But I picked it up quickly. Every other day the team would meet back in Frederic and take a group van to which ever field we had left the tractors in. To get the most out of daylight, we arrived at the field right at sunup and harvested until sundown. That’s a lot of hours constantly sitting in the sun going around in circles, filling up our bins with beans. The repetitive work affected my mind so much that I would find myself awakening in the middle of the night; sitting on the edge of my bed holding an imaginary steering wheel! There were also a couple of times I over-slept and had to have my mom drive me to the field. The skill of harvesting was 1) knowing how to align the slots in the harvester with the bean rows; 2) setting the blades at a height that would not scalp the dirt and not be too high to miss the beans. I got good enough that the crew supervisor would send me in first on a brand new field. It was tougher than usual because the first rows to cut were at the edge of property and were usually not planted straight. Toward the end of the year, I was taken off the manual tractor and given one with hydrostatic drive (much easier to put into gear. Because we were at the mercy of Mother Nature, we had rainy days off.
Forklift
1980 was the last year I worked at Stokely. I had earned the right to be one of two forklift drivers on the day shift. They were powered by propane. Instead of forks on the front, we had ‘squeezers’ that were made to move regular pallets around, but helped keep the boxes of beans in place while we stacked them in the warehouse. After cans of beans came out of the steamer, they went through a machine that pasted labels on them. At the end of the conveyor belt, workers would put them into boxes, then the boxes on a pallet. When a pallet was full, I would move it into the warehouse. I confess I didn’t work as hard as I was expected to. If I was going to be waiting more than 5 minutes for a pallet to fill up, I was supposed to help the others pack the boxes. I never did that. It didn’t make sense to me to turn off the forklift, jump off, then run back to it a few minutes later. Pallets were stacked in the columns up to 6 high and about 10 columns deep. Putting the top pallet on was nerve-wracking because if you moved the forklift too fast while the pallet was raised to its highest, you could tip the forklift! All the beans in the boxes would crash to the ground and either open up or be dented. I did drop a couple of pallets, but they were not far off the ground, so I was able to regroup the boxes. Dented cans could not be shipped, this they were considered ‘spoilage’. On the bright side, Stokely workers could take as many of the spoiled cans home with them. Yes, I got sick of canned green beans after awhile.
Conclusion
By working in various jobs in different locations in the factory, I learned to appreciate what it took to take raw materials and create a product for market. These were all menial jobs. During subsequent decades working in the computer industry using my brain to solve problems and getting stressed out about the silliest deadlines, I often thought about how fun it would be just to spend the day on a forklift moving things from here to there. It would be easier to quantify my accomplishments that way.
