Central Standard: A Time, a Place, a Family

THE TANK

The Tank Uncle Clell was the youngest of my father’s eleven brothers and sisters . Some people theorize that the youngest child in a large family often develops a mild, easy-going disposition. Based on my observations of Uncle Clell, I would say that his personality supported this theory. I never saw him get upset about anything. If he ever spoke a word in anger, I wasn’t around to hear it. Uncle Clell entered this life in 1911 and subsequently attended Buttontown Grade School, just as all his older brothers and sisters had done. As an adult, Uncle Clell was taller than my father, but he resembled him closely in many other ways — with dark hair, a neat mustache , a well-formed nose, a high forehead, and a love of humor. Like my father, Uncle Clell followed a course of study in normal training at Bloomfield High School, where he graduated at the age of eighteen. Unlike my father, he managed to get to Bloomfield for the qualifying exam required for teacher certification. He passed the test with ease and began teaching in the country schools of Davis County in 1929, the first year of the Great Depression. “He taught for one year at a school called Clay College,” my aunt Mabel told me as we sat in the front room of her house in Ottumwa one warm September afternoon in 2001. “The next year he taught at IXL.” IXL happened to be the same school where I began my education eighteen years after Uncle Clell had taught there. As far as I know, Uncle Clell was a fine teacher. But during his year at IXL, an unhappy problem arose. “Because of the Depression,” Aunt Mabel said, “the county had no money to pay him. He taught nine monthswithoutpay.”Inthosedays,theteacheroftenlivedwiththeparents of the children in the school, moving from family to family as the year progressed, so perhaps Uncle Clell received room and board. How he paid for clothing and other necessities remains a mystery. I’m sure the other teachers in the system faced the same problems. After the school year ended, the county finally managed to come up with the money to pay the teachers, including Uncle Clell. But he could see that he had entered a precarious line of work. He wanted to marry and raise a family, which you cannot do with any degree of comfort if you get paid only once a year. So he gave up schoolteaching and took a job with a prosperous farmer north of Ottumwa. But the Depression made work of this sort as precarious as schoolteaching. This year’s prosperous farmer could become next year’s bankrupt farmer, and the pay wasn’t all that good anyway. Uncle Clell wanted security, so he went out and found it. With the kind of boldness that my father and his brothers repeatedly displayed, Uncle Clell walked into the hiring office of the John Morrell and Company meatpacking plant in Ottumwa and announced that he wanted a job from which he would never get laid off. “He said he wanted a job that was so bad that no one else would want it,” Aunt Mabel said. The man who interviewed him must have found this request for a bad job as unusual as someone asking for a broken leg. But he soon got the point and hired my uncle Clell to work in a department known as “the tank.” The men who worked in the tank processed tankage, excess fat from the hundreds of cattle and hogs slaughtered in the massive packinghouse every morning, Monday through Friday. They dried the fat in huge tanks, after which someone used it to produce fertilizer or feed for livestock. When he became convinced in 1935 that he had found a secure job, Uncle Clell married Mabel Cassill, who had grown up on a farm on the north edge of Ash Grove, not far from the farm where my mother grew up. Aunt Mabel was one of my mother’s dearest friends, and her marriage to my father’s brother only increased that friendship. “We didn’t have much to start with,” Aunt Mabel told me, “but then neither did anyone else. Clell always kept his job and we did the best we could. Lots of people had nothing at all, no jobs and no place to find one.” I mentioned the year 1936. “Chinch bugs and grasshoppers,” she said instantly. “We...