Machine Days

((A Minnesota Story, 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s) (Based on actual events))


In my younger days, there were more factories with machines—small and large—more than the fast-food out-lets we have nowadays (drive-ins, cafés, restaurants, and alike). That’s back thirty, forty, near fifty-years or so ago (I’m sixty-two now). And behind those days—I’d expect it was even more so.
I am speaking of machinery in America, factories with machinery and foundries in Minnesota, and in particular, the City of St. Paul, where I grew up (although I’ve worked in many cities, Minneapolis, Omaha, San Francisco, Seattle, Erie, to mention a few).
I can still hear the clatter of the machines at Whirlpool where I worked for a year, back in 1966, and those at American Can (1968). I can hear the whirr and the screeching and the pounding of machinery making cast-iron molds, at the foundries ((Malibu Iron, where I worked back in 1965 and 1972) (in St. Paul, and Erie)); and the murmur and shouts of men at the stockyards (Swift’s) in South St. Paul (1967)—they used machines to kill animals, conveyer belts and so for and so on.
It was all after World War Two, and the Korean War, and just before the Vietnam War (my war to be; even in war we used machines).
The machines hum and talk like a horde of chipmunks, they roar like lions, they dance and sway on steel rafters like monkeys, high overhead, as at “Structural Steel,” where I worked for a winter season back in ’68.
Machines have legs, bodies, arms, fingers, feet; they hold onto things, they have giant hands.
They swing this way and that way, some everywhichway. They weigh tons, run madly all day long. I was once a junior machinist (back in 1971, after I returned from the War in Vietnam), that is—an apprentice—they make things, big and small: bridges, holes in parts just about anything and everything. They feed upon oil, power from water, electricity, batteries, and coal, even nuts. Back in 1972-73, I worked for a power plant in Erie.
Their wheels groan and grind, and screech, make horrid sounds to the ears. They produce smoke, darker than the hearts of men. Machines control, and similar to their makers, they wear out. I’ve had over forty-jobs, in my lifetime, the best thing about machines is: their stupid, you can tell them anything, and they say nothing. They are bleak and cold, they don’t beg for the sun or the cool breeze off the lake—how smoothly they can run, how surely. I tell you there will be a day when people will pay machines to talk to, they’re better listeners than humans (and they don’t have cheap—expensive advice to give; and their friendship is never deceiving).

No: 541 (12-6-2009) SA