Blade Envy

For many years dad worked at Kimberly-Clark Corporation at their newsprint mill in Childersburg, Alabama. That's where he worked until he retired at 66. There are many stories about the years he worked there. Some I heard from Dad and some I heard from people who worked with him. A buddy of mine worked there after high school and got to know dad. He told me that dad reminded him of the Pink Panther - cool and always up to something. I think that description fits. This story is about a lesson in both gullibility and just desserts.

Dad had bought a new knife to use at work. Dad was a Schrade man. This particular knife had three blades, one of which had a straight edge and a rounded off end (like the one in the attached picture). This type of blade is handy for cutting a slit in cable insulation. Dad was an electronic technician and it was important to have a proper knife for his job.

One day at lunch Dad and his friend, Paul Grub, were admiring his new knife when several electricians came into the shop. One of them asked, "Where'd you get the new knife, Wesley?"

Dad answered, "From the tool shop. I broke my old knife and they gave me this as a replacement."

The fellow said, "I didn't know they did that."

Dad replied, "Well they did for me."

Everyone admired Dad's new knife while they ate their lunch.

Later in the day a group of electricians cornered dad to let him know what they thought of his parentage and moral character.

It seems that the tool shop didn't carry knives and never did. But now a half dozen electricians had pocket knives with newly broken blades.

Dad just laughed at them and went back to work.

Meat Trick

Dad used to work at the Beaunit rayon mill in Childersburg before it closed down in the sixties. He made friends with a fellow named Bill Eaves while there. After the closing, Dad went to work at the Kimberly-Clark paper mill right next door to the Beaunit plant. Bill Eaves went to work at a textile mill across the river in Columbiana, where he and his family lived. They stayed in touch for many years after. We would go visit the Eaves and they would come visit us via Perkins Ferry, which crossed Coosa river from Talladega county to Shelby county.

Dad liked to deer hunt but Bill Eaves' opinion was that hunting deer was a waste of time because the meat wasn’t any good when you got it. Bill's reasoning was that the deer had been run to exhaustion by the time it was killed and that wild animals didn’t eat well out in the woods. The combination of factors caused the meat to be tough and gave it a bad taste, in Bill's opinion. Dad disagreed but didn't argue. He did begin to scheme.

Some months later, Dad invited the Eaves over for supper on a Saturday night. He asked Mom to cook a venison roast from a four-point buck that he had killed that season. Mom was in on the trick and told the Eaves that they were having roast, but didn't elaborate.

While they were eating on the evening of the get-together, Bill and his wife bragged on how good the roast was. Bill had raised some cattle on his property and gave his expert opinion on the roast: it was obviously corn-fed beef, brought into the pens when it was young and fed nothing but grain so that the meat would not be tainted by the flavor of grass. Bill also also pointed out that the roast had been cut by an expert butcher.

At about this point Dad went to the trash and pulled out the butcher paper with “ROAST” written on it in Dad's own handwriting. That, along with the grin on Dad’s face clued Bill in that he’d been had. Bill Eaves shook his head and said, “You’re not going to tell me that this is deer meat are you?”

The answer was yes and we’re still laughing about this over 30 years later.

Links:

Beaunit Rayon factory: http://goforth-al.blogspot.com/2007/02/beaunit-rayon-factory.html

Perkins Ferry: http://alabama.hometownlocator.com/maps/feature-map,ftc,2,fid,152871,n,perkins%20ferry.cfm