I was just one side or the other of four years old the first time my dad took me to work with him. He managed the machine shop at Southern Tool in Oxford, Alabama. Two things about that visit have stayed with me all these years.
The first is Colonel Armstrong. He was retired from the U.S. Army, and had invested significantly enough in Southern Tool’s infancy to warrant an impressive shop and office in the facility. I remember the shop well, and it was a gearhead’s fantasyland. He loved steam engines and clocks, and both were all over the place.
I remember him feeding one of his locomotive models a little scrap of lumber, and just delighting in my reaction when I saw how that piece of wood was turned into motion at the wheels. Mind, this is all one-off stuff; not anything that came out of a catalog. He’d designed, built, and assembled it all. He’d had help in the machine shop, but still…you know? How cool is that?
He also loved clocks, both mechanical and electrical. I remember the yellow glow and heat of an enormous digital clock he’d built that must have contained 1,000 incandescent bulbs. However, he also loved the purely mechanical movements. My dad remembers him taking in an enormous and ailing half-million dollar cuckoo clock, spending a couple of days with it, and sending it on its way in perfect order.
What a neat guy to have around when you bring your four-year-old kid to work, eh?
The other thing I remember was the general feel of the place, for lack of a better way to put it. It was a machine shop—a factory, if not a final assembly point for any composite product—so actual stuff was being made. There was a glorious and omnipresent smell of metal, oil, and heat. The place felt alive.
It thrummed.
I felt that thrum again in 1991 when I interned at Champion International Corporation in Courtland, Alabama. I put out a thrice-weekly newsletter called Reel Notes, as well as assisted in putting out a monthly newsletter called Chips. I also dabbled in some training video production. It was a good time, and it was the first time I stood up and said I wanted to be a technical writer.
But it was the never-ending production that was the life of the place. There were 6,000 employees at the paper mill. Situated on the Tennessee River, it was completely self-sufficient, dependent on no public works for power or water. I was accustomed to driving up on it at 6 am, and it was really something to take in its expanse and all its twinkling.
It was ten times that something to be out on the floor. There were three paper machines, each the size of a freight locomotive. As impressive as they were, it was the pulp infrastructure that was really amazing. From debarking the trees to pulverizing them to chemically treating them, I got to know each part of the process. I rode with Bobby on his runabout as he flew around this machine and that pipe, seemingly within inches but really with a foot or two to spare (I ducked my head a lot more than he did).
I was way prouder than I let on of the hard hat and the respiratory emergency kit I was issued. I loved having those things.
I wanted to work at Champion badly when I graduated a year later. It thrummed. But, sadly, there was nothing for me there when it was time to go to work.
That thrum is the only thing I can think of that I’ve missed professionally, yet even that’s a tad dramatically expressed. I really have no significant career regrets. I just started my 15th year doing the very first thing I ever seriously said I wanted to do for a living, and I’m still enjoying it, and it’s lucrative enough to support the lifestyle I want for myself and my family. Wow, what a blessing!
But I’ve never worked anywhere that actually made physical goods. Everywhere I’ve worked has profitably manipulated information, not matter. I wonder sometimes if my affection for that thrum will have to be satisfied someday.
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I know exactly what “oil, metal, and heat” smell like. This was a great ride, Bo – thanks for taking me along.
Do you think that you undervalue the “profitably managed information”? It’s a big idea I’m trying to get across in a few words, but I know a lot of people, men in particular, have a sense that if they’re not MAKING something, then they’re not DOING anything; at least, not anything of value. I guess I just want to know if you’re maybe not discounting the important work that you do because you’ve got no grease under your nails…
Thanks for the compliment. Smell is so visceral, isn’t it?
I don’t think so. I’ve made stuff, too: I can hold in my hand books that I’ve written, for example. Not the same, though.
It’s more of an itch that I wonder if I’ll have to scratch sometime, not a crisis of conscience. 🙂
I grew up going to granddaddy’s law offices. Smelled like old books and intelligence with a dash of wagering.