My father’s meatpacker’s ethic

Sometimes, fathers and sons hold conversations even after the father has died. They discuss the codes of ethics and conduct they shared. My dad’s long gone from this world but we still talk.

Dad worked as a meat-packer. He told me two important truths: “Keep pluggin’” and “It’s a tough life.”

He grew up in Central Illinois and when the great poverty of the 1930s rolled in and grampa lost the farm, dad went to live with his Uncle Fred. He found God’s mercy in playing basketball that gained him a college scholarship. He left the depressed landscape to the scarecrows. Northwestern University recruited him, then, afterward, enlisting to fight as a Ranger, he was decorated at Hill 400 in World War II.

His love for life and his love for the moral truth are a part of my conversation with him. He once said he couldn’t understand how every trench he ever hunkered down in held a priest. Moral quandaries exist everywhere.

He said that to succeed we often have to rise from the bottom, that morals are greater than we sometimes appreciate.

He showed me the journey could be worthwhile.

I imagine his cold winter at war, the impossible jobs he and his group were asked to do. He and his Rangers were the first to penetrate Hitler’s boundary beyond the Rhine River, into hell. Later, when they opened the Dachau concentration camp. He said people were “Stacked like wood.”

When the war ended he wanted to teach but couldn’t wait for the job to come to him. He went to work in meatpacking, a primitive business that I followed him into, for a while. Meatpacking can be an ever changing chaos, one hundred years ago described in The Jungle.

I have often chilled at his coming home from atrocity, the scale of death, from fields in Germany and vistas of killing, from gas chambers, pits filled with the dead from a ground of slaughter, to return to walk the killing floors in The Union Stock Yards.

When he labored there it was the greatest functional, killing and packing facility the world had ever seen.

When I was 19 I worked for his company on Emerald Street.

The cold floors of the slaughterhouse could shake a man; the smells could leave a stench in every follicle of hair. I stood on the second shift canning line next to an old woman who tossed me the hams, cuts that I packed and moved down the line. Today I look at my hands for the little scars that the sharp edges of the cans left.

“It’s steady,” he once said.

As the years passed dad grew into management. When he supervised, he looked for people who held his values, the ethics he lived, that included the golden rule.

Today, I’m the one who teaches.

Before I stood in front of a class, not long ago, I spoke with dad. He said the issues take thoughtfulness, that there is a right and wrong.

“What do you think?” I asked class about immigration.

“How are people marginalized like that? They’re not human, is that the idea?”

They said, maybe the immigrants were getting a better life.

“What about morals? How can people be treated less than us, less than human.” Dad asked me before class.

“What about your government. You worked at Agar Packing Company. We had immigrants who worked very hard …”

Dad said that during World War II, Chamberlain told everyone it was OK, before it all began. Chamberlain said no one wanted war, despite the evidence.

The issue of race, even the recognition of humanity, people seen as alien, had dominated dad's time. Similar to today's conversation about immigration.

War arrived with pillars of deception.

My dad, the Ranger, the meat-packer, would be worried today. Humanity seems to be questioning right and wrong, war and peace.

Tim Trenkle has been an instructor in the college system in Iowa, most recently at Upper Iowa University. He lives in Dubuque.