The Way I Heard It

by Mike Rowe

  If the farmer had let bygones be bygones, who knows what our world would look like today? But of course the farmer didn’t, because stealing a pig in Iowa back in 1948 was like rustling cattle in Colorado a hundred years earlier. It was larceny—especially in Grinnell, where any physics major could have told you that every action had an equal and opposite reaction. Like the good Christian he was, the farmer forgave Bobby’s sin. But he still had to press charges. Even though the sheriff liked Bobby, he still had to arrest him. Even though the dean of the college admired Bobby, he still had to expel him. As for the preacher, who loved his son, well, there was nothing he could say in the face of such obvious guilt—and so, he said nothing.

  But not everyone believed that the reaction to Bobby’s crime had been equal or opposite or even just.

  Grant Gale, a physics professor at Grinnell College, came to Bobby’s defense. He implored the dean, the sheriff, the mayor, and all the good people in town to rethink the penalty for purloined pork and find a punishment that fit the crime.

  In the end the farmer dropped the charges, the sheriff backed off, and Bobby’s expulsion was reduced to a one-semester suspension.

  For some students, that might have translated into a four-month vacation, but not for Bobby. Because in the midst of Grinnell’s Great Swine Scandal, Professor Gale had received a very interesting package in the mail—a package that contained two prototypes from Bell Laboratories sent to him by a Grinnell graduate.

  The professor was intrigued. He used one of the prototypes to demonstrate the flow of electrons through a solid in what turned out to be the very first college class ever offered in solid-state electronics. And the other prototype? That wound up in the hands of the suspended senior who liked to tinker and take risks. But not necessarily in that order.

  You see, if Bobby hadn’t spent endless hours tinkering with that prototype—the first transistor produced by Bell Labs—there would have been no small step for Neil Armstrong, because Apollo 11 would not have had an on-board computer. For Steven Spielberg, there would have been no Jurassic Park—because there would have been no computer-generated imagery. And for Britney Spears, there would have been no Grammy Awards—because there would have been no Auto-Tune.

  The exact details of how Bobby transformed the modern age would fill a book—a book best written by a physicist, or someone who really understands how the universe works. But this much can be explained by me: without Bobby’s willingness to assume risks, all of his tinkering would have been for naught—because if you think diving off a roof strapped to a homemade kite is risky, try launching a start-up in Silicon Valley before the silicon’s even there.

  That’s exactly what Bobby did, back in 1968. And even though you might not know his name, you know what’s inside: inside your coffee machine, your electric razor, your car, your remote control, your kids’ favorite toy, your Fitbit, your laptop, and of course the smartphone you can’t leave home without. It’s the very same thing that Bobby was tinkering with during his fortuitous suspension from college. The same thing they’re still tinkering with today at a company called Intel.

  That’s the legacy of Robert Noyce—a man who liked to tinker and take risks, but not necessarily in that order. But let’s not forget Bob’s silent partner: a twenty-five-pound suckling pig whose impact on our lives began with a brief appearance at a long-forgotten luau in America’s heartland. A pig whose sacrifice gave us a tiny piece of silicon we call… the microchip.

  * * *

  Forty years after Robert Noyce put a pig on a spit and transformed the world—one year before I put a pig on a pedestal and transformed my blue jeans—another Robert was doing things with pigs that could not be ignored. And so, they weren’t. This Robert became the most popular character we ever featured on Dirty Jobs. And those pigs of his? They finished the job that legions of tourists and gamblers could not.

  For fifty years, Bob Combs drove his ancient pickup truck up and down the Las Vegas strip, loaded it up with uneaten buffet food from high-end hotels and casinos, and returned to his modest farm in north Las Vegas. There, in an otherwise normal backyard, he shoveled the spoils into a massive cooker, a towering, Rube Goldbergian contrivance that transported the smorgasbord into a giant stewpot located three stories above the ground. It wasn’t high tech, but it worked. Before long, the grub was reduced to a viscous, beigey bouillabaisse.

  Bob told my field producer, Barsky, that the smell reminded him of a bakery.

  He’d built the entire contraption himself with parts cobbled together from local junkyards. And so, tons of uneaten people food—waste that would have wound up in the landfill—ended up filling the troughs on his farm. Thanks to Bob, a city that traffics in excess suddenly had a conservation program worth bragging about.

  I accompanied Bob as he drove that ancient pickup down from the cooker to the troughs, with boiling slop sloshing over the roof, down the windshield, and onto the hood. Barsky’s eyes widened as hundreds of ravenous pigs descended upon the leftovers. I can still hear the crescendo of squealing and slurping that accompanied this wild and gluttonous scene. It was epic. Just… epic.

  To this day, people ask me about Bob Combs. I tell them that he was a cross between Jimmy Stewart and Old MacDonald—the living embodiment of everything Dirty Jobs had set out to highlight: a modest, good-humored man, armed with an extraordinary work ethic; a man who had found a new angle and thrived in a business with very tight margins. As grain prices rose, squeezing all of the farmers around him, Bob kept drawing from his endless supply of leftovers. It was hard work, to be sure, but it was good for his business, good for the environment, and very good for the city of Las Vegas. But when we first met, in 2006, Bob was a man besieged by an army of angry acronyms—HSUS, EPA, OSHA—as well as his neighbors, who wanted to close his operation down because his pig farm smelled like… a pig farm.

  Las Vegas was booming, and a pig farm wasn’t what hundreds of homeowners wanted so close to their brand-new homes. They didn’t care that Bob had been there for decades. They didn’t care that Bob was providing a valuable public service. The only thing they cared about was the smell—and making it go away.

  Developers fumed. Committees formed. Petitions were circulated, and hearings were held. The pressure to close down Bob’s farm was unrelenting, but Bob held fast and I’m glad he did, because after that Dirty Jobs episode aired, the developers tried a different tack: they pooled their resources and offered to buy Bob’s property. They offered him a staggering sum: 75 million dollars.

  Bob passed.

  “Bob,” I said. “What are you thinking? It’s 75 million dollars.”

  Bob replied, “Yeah. But what would I do with my pigs?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Kill them? Eat them? You’re going to anyway, right?”

  Bob didn’t have anything to say to that. But it occurred to me later that his real question wasn’t “What would I do with my pigs?” It was “What would I do without them?”

  Bob Combs had put his pigs on a pedestal years before I came along. He knew what mattered most to him. It was the work, you see. Work that would have ceased had he taken the money. Work that defined him, even though he was approaching his eightieth year. Work that he was simply not ready to abandon.

  “I kinda like the smell,” he told me. “I guess I’ve gotten used to it.”

  THE GREASEMAN COMETH

  The grease man dragged his shovel across the wooden floor and stabbed it into the towering pile of coal with a satisfying crunch.

  Technically, this was a job for the fireman—but the grease man wasn’t one to complain. In 1869, complaining on the Michigan Central Railroad got you nowhere. Lifting with his legs and pivoting with his hips, the grease man flipped his wrist, sent the anthracite sailing through the air, and watched it vanish into the furnace’s gaping mouth. The sounds of his work kept time with the tempo of the train that swayed beneath him—a steady Sisyphean rhythm propelling man and machine through America’s hear
tland.

  As the grease man shoveled, it occurred to him that his body worked a lot like the engine he fed: the more fuel he gave it, the faster it went. But when the train slowed and ground to a sudden halt—for the fifth time that day—the grease man stopped thinking in metaphors and prepared himself for the job at hand: the job that no one wanted but somebody had to do. Armed with an oil can, a giant brush, and a bucket of rendered animal fat, he jumped from the engine car and began the business of lubricating the axles, as well as every piece of exposed metal inside the locomotive’s engine. It was tough work, it was hot work, but there was no getting around it.

  Back then, locomotives were constantly shutting down for oiling and loosening. So, too, were engines and wheels and machines in factories all over the world. Everything that moved needed lubrication, and nothing could be lubricated while it was moving. Thus the wheels of civilization could only turn as quickly as the grease man could work. And so, after ten minutes of contortions underneath several boxcars and inside the engine itself, our hero emerged looking very much like a glazed doughnut. Sweat streamed down his forehead and stung his eyes. Chunks of animal fat clung to his overalls and skin. Was he resentful? Did he believe that his fancy apprenticeship at a prestigious machine shop in Scotland entitled him to something more than a job shoveling coal and slathering lubricant into the entrails of this iron horse? The short answer is “no.” But the grease man didn’t think about that. He was too thirsty to think—very, very thirsty. Yet as he gulped down cup after cup of cool water, he was struck once again by the similarities between a hardworking engine and a hardworking railroad man. Along with copious amounts of fuel, both required plenty of internal lubrication.

  The grease man refilled his empty cup and wondered aloud, “What if a train could be hydrated as easily as a man?”

  It was a good question, and for the next year he tinkered in his workshop, determined to find an answer. Eventually he perfected a prototype and applied for a patent. His device was simple: a reservoir of oil that used gravity to deliver just enough of the lubricant to wherever it was needed while the engine was still running. He called it a lubricating cup. If it worked, locomotive engines would no longer need to stop in order to be oiled. True, a mechanical solution would eliminate his own job. But, all things considered, it seemed like a risk worth taking.

  As it turned out, the lubricating cup did work—and the impact on productivity and mobility was astounding. Word of this breakthrough spread all over the country; soon every engineer and conductor from Tacoma to Tallahassee was demanding one.

  Obviously, the grease man was in no position to leap into mass production. So, for the next few years, cheap imitations popped up everywhere. They all promised the same results, but none proved as reliable as the original. In fact, most of the knockoffs made the problem even worse. If it wasn’t the grease man’s original lubricating cup, it just wasn’t worth the price.

  Over the next sixty years, the grease man would apply for and receive fifty-six additional mechanical patents. His work revolutionized the Industrial Revolution. He invented the ironing board along the way (his wife was tired of steaming his shirts), as well as the sprinkler (he was tired of watering his lawn). But it was the lubricating cup he came up with that changed the pace of modern civilization and helped build the infrastructure we rely upon today.

  According to Thomas Edison, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” If he had consulted with the grease man, whose name was Elijah, he might have assigned a few percentage points to lubrication—and emancipation, as well. Because long before Elijah was greasing wheels on the Michigan Central Railroad, hundreds of anonymous men and women were quietly greasing different sets of wheels on a different set of tracks: tracks that carried Elijah’s parents from a plantation in Kentucky to a small town in Canada. There, the grease man had been born—unlike his father, a free man.

  Thanks to the Underground Railroad, Elijah was afforded an opportunity. Thanks to his parents, Elijah was afforded an apprenticeship. And thanks to his work ethic and his unquenchable thirst to build a better mousetrap, Elijah was afforded so much success that his last name still resonates today. You know it. You’ve probably used it. It’s a slave name that’s become synonymous with everything authentic, everything original—a name we invoke today whenever our search for the genuine article leads us to ask… “Is that the real McCoy?”

  * * *

  “You can’t script the Bering Sea.”

  Phil Harris said that at another one of our roundtable After the Catch conversations. We were having a round of duck farts and discussing the strange appeal of Deadliest Catch when Phil offered that brilliant rejoinder. He repeated it under his breath seconds later as he lit one more cigarette.

  “You can’t script the Bering Sea.”

  “Damn,” I said. “Why do you say the best stuff when the cameras aren’t rolling?”

  Phil shrugged. “Why do you ask the best questions during commercials?”

  I laughed and repeated the same question a few minutes later. But of course, with the cameras rolling, Phil gave a different answer—as I knew he would.

  “It’s the narrator,” he said. “He’s the secret to our success. That sexy devil could make anything sound exciting.”

  “Well,” I said, “there’s no accounting for taste.”

  The captains laughed and we moved on to another topic, but I had been struck once again by Phil’s stubborn refusal to repeat himself. He saw second takes as a performance. It drove the producers crazy, because Phil said so many great things off camera. But Phil figured reality TV ought to be real, and he did his best to keep it that way.

  “What the hell happened?” he asked during the next break. “One minute, I’m watching Jacques Cousteau, Jane Goodall, and David Attenborough. Now all I see are ‘real’ housewives who ain’t real at all and ‘survival’ experts drinking their own pee. What the hell’s next?”

  He threw another duck fart back and lit one more cigarette.

  “You’re right,” I said. Because he was. Not long after that conversation, the Amish got a Mafia, the Ducks got a Dynasty, Honey got a Boo-Boo, and “reality” TV became profoundly unreal. Today it’s about making moonshine, flipping houses, panning for gold, pawning crap in storage lockers, and getting yelled at by angry chefs who’ve been paid to get angry. Everyone else is Naked and Afraid.

  I’ve seen the scripts for many of those “unscripted” shows. Believe me, they exist—and they’re no less detailed than the script of a sitcom or a movie. But one thing’s for sure: no matter how hard Hollywood tries to “produce” reality, Phil got it right. You can’t script the Bering Sea.

  There was a great moment in Anthony Bourdain’s show Parts Unknown. Phil Harris didn’t live to see it, but he would have loved it. Tony goes scuba diving for octopi in Sicily—but there are no octopi to be found. Then, out of nowhere, they appear—all around him. Unbeknown to Bourdain, a local producer is dropping them off the side of the boat above him.

  Imagine the scene: Bourdain is twenty feet down with his cameraman and his spear when store-bought frozen octopi begin to float by his head. That’s what any “reality” producer in my business would do to “salvage” a scene—but it makes Bourdain crazy. He’s so appalled, he does the only sensible thing he can think to do: he starts drinking in protest and continues to drink for the rest of the episode, to the point where he’s useless on camera. Later on, in voice-over, he rips into the producer for attempting to fool his viewers and demands that CNN air the raw footage. Which, to its credit, CNN does. The one time I got to meet Tony, I complimented him on that episode. Like Joan Rivers, Phil Harris, and the Bering Sea, Tony couldn’t be scripted.

  On the very first season of Deadliest Catch, back before anyone understood what the show might become, someone at the network thought crab fishing would make for a terrific game show. I’m not kidding: as the host of whatever this thing was, I was instructed to award a c
ash prize of $250,000 to the “winning” boat, on camera. The ingenious producer who came up with the idea was not in Dutch Harbor when the commander of the Coast Guard found out about it, but I was.

  “Are you people out of your minds?”

  It was a general question, posed to a small group of producers, cameramen, and me.

  “Gentlemen, this is the most dangerous job on the planet. How much deadlier do you want it to be?”

  The commander was looking directly at me. In the ensuing silence, it seemed rude not to reply.

  “Well, sir, I can’t speak for the network, but it seems to me—”

  “What’s your name, son?”

  The commander was my age but called me “son.” How awesome is that?

  “I’m Mike Rowe,” I said.

  “Are you the star of the show?”

  “No, I’m the host.”

  “Do you work for the Discovery Channel?”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “Then why the hell can’t you speak for them?”

  I understood the commander’s frustration. Every week, the Coast Guard answers multiple calls from fishing boats in distress, boats captained by mortal men who sometimes push things a little too far in the race to get as much crab on board as quickly as possible. In the commander’s eyes, we were morons who’d flown in from Hollywood to throw gas on a fire that was already burning out of control.

  The commander wasn’t entirely wrong.

  “Trust me,” I said. “I’m sure that my masters won’t want to turn your crab season into a free-for-all.”

  The commander sighed and shook his head. “You don’t get it, son. It’s already a free-for-all. And you guys are making it worse.”

  Once again, he wasn’t wrong to worry: the act of watching a thing always changes the behavior of the thing you’re watching. It’s called the “observer effect.” It’s true in physics, and it’s true in crab fishing. With or without $250,000 to dish out, a film crew in Dutch was going to change things. But the commander wasn’t entirely right, either.