Okay, so technically I’m a day late in writing this post. No excuses, just a lot of activity yesterday part of which included a nap when I should have been writing my post. So in my own little blog world, I’m going to pretend that it’s yesterday and write the post that I wanted to write yesterday.
This is the first Labor Day that I can remember that I am actually celebrating as a Labor Day. Prior to my accident, I spent the Labor Days out on a boat somewhere in the middle of the absolutely crazy Lake of the Ozarks. Boats everywhere, not just the small family variety, but BIG boats ranging anywhere from 40 to 80 feet. By the middle of the day, the waves were at least 4 feet plus. I once tried to cross main channel of the lake in a 40 foot pontoon boat during the middle of the day. That should give you some idea of how crazy I was even before my accident!
This Labor Day I would like to remember some people that have set the tone for labor in my life. If the reader is inquisitive, there is plenty more to read about ancestors beyond my Grandma Heintz ( Cadwell), Grandpa Arthur Atkisson, Ernest Mings, or John Widner. But in this tribute, I’ll only reach that far back.
Let’s start with my Grandpa Arthur Atkisson. He enjoyed the life of an entrepreneur long before they were called such. My father told me that grandpa Atkisson started the Red Ball Trucking Company which was still in existence the last time I checked. He started with one truck and had several by the time he sold the company. During my growing years, I remember my grandpa’s syrup factory. He supplied pancake syrup to several Pancake House chain restaurants and independent restaurants throughout the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states. In the beginning, he made and delivered the syrup during the day and slept in the back of the factory during the night. He existed mostly on a peanut butter-syrup mix that he would put on sandwiches. He had no shower and he told me the story once of how he went to wash his hands with Lava soap that is normally quite gritty. He felt the grit on his hands as he was washing them in the dark, but when he looked down to see how it was going his hands were completely cut and bleeding. He had a habit of leaving his razor blades poked into the soap and had thought that it was just the normal feeling of the soap! When I asked him if he had taken any time off because of this injury, he told me that he just bandaged them up the best he could and went back to work.
He made syrup of all different flavors from fresh ingredients. I remember watching him squeeze the juice out of blackberries with a hand turn colander. The vats that he cooked the syrup in were huge. You had to climb to the top of them on a ladder to add the ingredients. Usually each batch required several hundred pounds of sugar which he carried bag by bag individually in 100 pound bags up on the ladders to add to the steaming hot mix of other ingredients. Working at his factory was my very first job. I worked there for one week during the summer. When I was done with that week he asked me how much I thought my work was worth. When I told him that I didn’t know, he chided me and taught me that I should always know the monetary value of my labor going into a job. He paid me 20 bucks for that week and I kept it in a glass jar on our family mantle for several years. He taught me so many more important things during that week, but I will mention just one more. He told me that no matter what my position in a company was that I should never step over a pile of trash that needed cleaning, but rather I should just clean it. I watched him interview a young man once and he had purposely placed a pile of trash with a broom and dust pan in the path of the young man coming for the interview. The young man stepped over the trash and sat down for the interview. My grandpa looked at me and just shook his head. Needless to say, that young man was not hired.
My Grandpa Ernest Mings was different. He eschewed the life of an entrepreneur and developed stability in his worklife. He worked at a state hospital for the mentally ill as an orderly first and then in the kitchen. Every day was labor for him, but I don’t ever remember him complaining. The pay was low, but he and my grandmother were frugal. They bought a used railroad caboose at a salvage auction and had it moved to a piece of land that they had bought in Pueblo, Colorado. They remodeled that caboose into a very small home in which they lived the rest of their lives. They eventually added on a room here and there until it had five rooms total. I doubt that he or grandmother ever missed a day of work. After their retirement, they didn’t lie around and watch TV. They worked every day, a full day, in their yard and in their house. I’m sure if Walmart would have been around then, they would have worked as greeters until they died!
My Grandpa John Widner was a farmer. He raised acres of row crops and acres of apple trees. He worked hard from Sun up to Sun down. I remember going there and sleeping in their basement. When it was time for all of us “laborers” to get up he would bang on the upstairs floor with a broom handle until we came upstairs. He and grandmother had 10 children of their own which he pretty much considered his free labor. I remember working what seemed like the longest hottest day of the summer one time while we were visiting. At the end of the day, he invited us into his air-conditioned fruit stand and each one of us got to pick a soda pop that was ice cold. That was one payday that I thoroughly enjoyed! I loved Grandpa Widner for a lot of positive reasons. His normal disposition was grumpy, but at the end of the day, in the cool of the night, you could hear him humming 100 yards away as he was counting his money! In fairness, he taught me an important lesson by negative example. He used to sell apples in large gunny sacks that you could see through. To fill those bags, he would place a stovepipe in the center of the bag and put all of the best apples around the outside of the bag and fill the inside with bad or even rotten apples. When I asked him about that practice, which he called “stove piping”, he told me that the people expected the apples in the middle to be bad so that they would have some apples to make cider with. From that moment forward, I vowed that whatever I work I did in life would be my best through and through. No stove piping for me.
My Grandpa Hoss worked in a steel factory all of his life and I don’t know much about him or his work. But my grandma Heinz (Cadwell) was a different matter. Every time we would visit them, she would never sit down until the meal was cooked, served, and cleaned up. I really didn’t know the extent of her hard work until I was much older. I learned that she worked for years and years in a laundromat doing the cleaning and ironing of other people’s clothes. The heat was unbearable in the summer and the work hard on the back and hands. I remember her frail curled up arthritic hands that no doubt were the result of her laundromat years. When we visited her house, she would always find jobs for us children and we were not allowed idle time. Her motto was tried and true, “an honest day’s labor for an honest days pay.” Our pay for the odd jobs she assigned us: dinner! And there was nothing better that I could have hoped for. Her roast and potatoes were to die for.
From what I can remember, my father worked hard every day while I was growing up. But, he was adamant in keeping the Sabbath day holy. We may not have gone to church much, but we always spent those days together as family, usually taking off on some drive with no destination in mind and enjoying whatever we found along the way. My father inherited an entrepreneurial spirit from my grandfather. His main line of work was that of a salesman. He told me once that a good salesman can always find work. He created several ways for me to learn how to be a salesman while I was growing up. I sold Cub Scout popcorn and single-handedly sold more than twice what the rest of our Cub Scout pack had sold. I should mention here that my father sold most of those himself, but he wanted me to have the joy that comes from being the top salesperson. A few years later, he worked out a program that the scouts could earn money by selling Shaklee vitamins and spices door to door. He would drop me off on one street and let me “work” the street door to door. At the end of the street, we would fill any orders that we could from the truck of supplies. I can’t tell you how much I absolutely hated that job. And, to this day I disdain sales and have never really been able to sell much of anything, even if it was free! Still, my dad taught me to push on every day with the mantra, “if your mind can conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it.” When my achievements didn’t measure up, he said that I needed to increase my powers of belief. I would watch him leave every Monday morning, often crying in the driveway as he drove away. He would return late Friday night or Saturday morning and tell stories of his adventures which included whatever he was selling at the time. He set a tremendous example for me to go back every single day and work no matter what had happened the day before. He worked pretty hard like that up until the day he discovered he had cancer and died within weeks. One important work concept that I learned from him, besides his daily tireless work, was that one could avoid a lot of downfall by giving considerable thought before engaging in the work. He held several jobs during my growing up years, but most of them involved selling insurance. I once found out how much money he made – $1000 a month – and thought that amount to be more than I would ever see. Of course, my parents were caught in the cultural consumerism of the time and were always complaining that we didn’t have enough money.
I have held a multitude of jobs myself, more than I wish to count. I feel like I have worked hard all of my adult life, but not necessarily smart. There are many jobs that I look back upon now which I should have kept. By sticking in one place with one company, especially when that company was growing, I could have done very well financially. I generally saw my work as having two goals: take care of my family financially and use the job as a stepping stone for my next job. I don’t believe that my children have seen me work hard from a labor standpoint. I have tried to work alongside them in yardwork or service work, but I believe that I have not been a very good example to them. I spent more time as a taskmaster and not enough time joining with them in the work. Often times, it just seemed easier for me to do the work then to work alongside them. That would definitely be something I would like to change next time around.
I will tell you one funny story though that comes from my years of working a graveyard shift. We were all riding in the car with Curtis seated next to a a window. He stared out at a cemetery and blurted out that I must be a very good gravedigger because I had held my graveyard shift for a long time. I still smile at that comment.
I hope that my legacy will show that I did work hard throughout my life, but most of my work has been more cerebral than physical. My only regret, as I mentioned above, is that I wish I would have stayed put in some companies like Quick Trip or Group Health.
As a father, I am extremely proud of the work ethic that my children already display. Seth works very hard to complete law school, while at the same time doing an internship with the SEC and maintaining his responsibilities as an editor with the BYU law review. Brianna works every day to be the best mother that she can. Previously to becoming a mother, she finished her college education and worked for a couple of years as a speech pathologist. Our son Curtis is working his way toward a PhD so that he can be a college professor. In the meantime, he has won several awards for papers and projects that he has participated in as an undergraduate. He is brilliant and is a wonderful example, as are our other children, of working with your brains. I should note that Curtis has also worked as the Director Of Marketing for a small software company and has been able to earn most of his money to pay for his own education and his other necessities. Our daughter Hannah, who is currently laboring every day in the hot jungles of Nicaragua as a missionary, has almost completed her bachelor’s in psychology and plans to go to graduate school in pursuit of being a therapist (yup, like me). This she plans to do before she gets married. Our last daughter, Saren is a tireless worker here in our home as our last child. Many of the chores fall to her and she also serves me happily with meals or other multitudinous requests.
I learned that one’s definition of work can change in an instant. As an adult, work has always been central to my role as a provider for this family. I readily admit that I have made many mistakes, but there never has a day gone by that I have not tried to supply the needs for our family.( with the exception of Sunday’s and some Saturdays). I never really knew how central this was to my psychological identity until after my accident. I woke up wondering what I was going to do to support my family and pay the huge medical costs. Tawnya claims that the first words out of my mouth were, “I guess I’ll have time to write that book now.” I had seriously been thinking about writing before my accident. But somehow the notion flew away on the wings of a butterfly. Once I attended the workforce services orientation program and was assigned a workforce services person, the push was on to get a job that paid. I understood their perspective and adopted the model wholeheartedly. I worked for a time at a call center reviewing notes that callers had made. It was difficult for me to put together two hours a day three days a week with any consistency. I soon was back in the hospital where I stayed for months. I have maintained my license as a clinical social worker and have had a few clients from that. Otherwise, I dropped into the abyss of the illusion of making millions on the Internet. It looked so easy and every new opportunity was just around the corner for only 20 or 30 bucks. Where could I go wrong? All I needed to do was just follow their plan and soon I would be raking in money. Well, as they say, it is much easier said than done. I discovered that most of these systems were making the lion’s share of their income by selling their ideas and approaches, not by actually working the system itself. Still, I kept pushing and narrowing myself down to what I thought could be feasible for myself to do. It turned out more than my brain could handle by myself and I was not in a financial position to be able to hire anyone else. Another very important reason why this failed was because it was all about money. I tried to trick myself into thinking I was building some app that would change the world. In the end I found out it really just about the money and I could not raise my level of passion high enough to sustain my interest. It was a very disturbing discovery for me and left me to ponder once again: why am I still alive? What is the purpose in dragging around a mostly dead body just to house and keep my brain, heart, and soul going?
I have some suggestions for generations to come. You can learn from my situation. Accidents are just a breath away for anyone and that breath may be your last. Maintain your life insurance and carry a healthy disability policy with a reputable company. I had a doctor friend who was hurt on a snowmobile accident when he was younger in his career. His disability insurance paid him at the rate he was making monthly for the rest of his life. Make sure that both parents are educated and prepared for a career that could support a family if needed. Get your education while you’re young. You can think better and you can remember more. You can always go back for more education, but at least get the basics for a valuable career. You just never know when you will need it. Tawnya had a full-ride scholarship to become a nurse with a very good university. We let that go in order to be married. In hindsight, it certainly would have been prudent for us to wait a year or two. Now, she has really had to struggle to get to that point so that she can be gainfully employed to support our family. Allow yourself to be flexible with regards to the roles that you play in your family. Our family has been sustained first and foremost with a great love that we have for each other, but that love has been put to the fire and purified. It’s not an easy journey for any family and despite your best plans, you can expect adversity on the way to becoming an eternal family.
That’s my tribute to work. I have only given my side. Tawnya’s side is equally filled with stories exemplifying a very strong work ethic. Work because it is necessary and work because it is fun. The closer the two become, the more enjoyable your life will be. Love, gimpa
