Some jobs received a bonus over and above the paycheck from the railroad.
The Rochelle day job spotted the "can plant" (Delmonte 110) where they made
the tinplate cans for many of their canning plants. The finished cans went
out in 50' boxes
to plants all over the Midwest. But the point of this story is the scrap
tinplate left over from the operation. The plant would load a 50' gon every
1/2 days w/scrap tinplate. This required a steady supply of mty gons as there
would always be one on spot to handle the scrap as it came out of the plant.
Now these MTY gons were not always totally MTY from the last load which often
was # 1 heavy melt scrap(which is the good stuff when it comes to scrap non
ferrous metal).
Old C.L. would "inspect" each new MTY gon as it arrived in a set out in town
to make sure that Delmonte did indeed receive a totally MTY and clean gon.He
sure didn't want to deprive them of any revenue by having space taken up by
somebody else's leftover scrap. He would climb inside the gon and pitch the
the stuff onto the edge of the R-O-W so that he could drive up to the
accumulation in his car on the way to lunch each day and then stop at the
scrap yard before arriving home for the noon day
meal. I was amazed that a '65 Impala could carry so much scrap in the trunk
w/o bottoming out!
Leo
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
|