Prairie Spy

by Linda, Alan

  “There you go,” I told her as I slid her off the first step, “get your foot down to this nexxxxxxxt one juuuuuust like that oh you’re good now don’t look for the kitty just put the other foot doooooown liiiike that on you’ve got it NO DON’T GRAB FOR THE RAILING IT’S TOO HIGH UP!!! that’s it now eeeeeassyy just get to the edge of the next one no give grandpa back his glasses he needs them more than you do NO DON’T THROW THEM OVER THE BANNISTER oh heck that’s alright they’re just drugstore specials anyway oh don’t cry if you cry you’ll get the stair steps all slick and then you’ll have a big problem.”

  About now, I began to remember teaching my kids to drive a car. I bought an old straight stick, cut off the roof, and turned them loose in the hay field with several bales of hay for pretend traffic.

  I resisted the immediate urge to build a set of training stairs out of bales of hay, and went back to what I had.

  “Okay now you’re on your own, Eleven, let’s see you put that fat little leg down like I showed you oooohhh that’s it you’re on your own you’ve got it you’ve got it you’re going to be the champion stair butt slider of all times NO DON’T LOOK UP NEVER LOOK UP YOU’LL GET DIZZY okay that’s better now one more just one more step oh you’ve got it you’ve got it.”

  We were down two stair steps and I had to pee but duty required finishing what we’d started here overactive prostate thingy be darned we’ll just ignore that for a while. (One could not completely eliminate the possibility that grandpa would be in diapers about the time Eleven gets out of them.)

  “Ready, Eleven? Here we go one more step don’t worry you should have seen your mom trying to sneak up these steps when she came home real late you’d have seen a real pro in action just push your butt out a liittttle more and slide down oh you’ve got it any day now you’ll come home late and have to sneak up stairs you’ll be a natural oh won’t you?”

  We had only two steps to go when she turned around and backed down the last two steps like she’d been faking it all along just to keep grandpa happy with this stupid butt-slider method.

  Next lesson: Washing dishes and turning out lights. Her mother didn’t like either one of them.

  §

  Chapter 5

  Bits and Pieces

  Advertising for Men

  Dynamite

  Burma Shave

  Class Reunion

  Cleaning the Tractor Toolbox

  Gopher Burn

  Guy Stuff

  Letter Alongside the Road

  Librarian Bar Codes

  Mustard Plaster

  Old Shoes

  Pig time Daylight Savings

  Pulled Over

  Retirement Monte Carlo

  Singing on Wings of Freedom

  Telephones That Crank

  The Day After Summer

  When I Grow Old

  Wood Tick

  Hardware Store at Christmas Time

  Advertising for Men

  A few years ago, I wrote and complained about men not getting equal time on television. It seemed like everything on the screen concerned the weaker sex and a disgusting tendency to develop feminine itch.

  If it wasn’t two very attractive young women calmly discussing feminine itch, then it was one woman squirming on a chair in a business meeting wishing she’d used Preparation H for her hemorrhoids. Me too. Wishing she had, that is. That way, I wouldn’t have had to watch her squirm.

  All this is bad enough, but then add in what must be the bottomless billion-dollar market for sanitary products, and it becomes obvious: men aren’t much value as consumers. Maybe one of the reasons is that men don’t have a hydraulic system that falls apart every 28 days. The truth is, if a tractor hydraulic system did that, we’d fix it. Women, however, have been kind of putting up with what has to be considered kind of a primitive way to lay an egg since time began. Even chickens could be accused of having a better life. I suppose all this is going to fall by the wayside once the new pill comes out that stretches their 28 days out to three months. Pretty quickly, we’ll be seeing those ads, one would suppose.

  What men need is to go bald every 28 days, because male baldness is the only real market that industry has aimed at, and it isn’t big enough to really compete with either feminine napkins (Napkins? Who thought that label up?) or feminine itch.

  Maybe if the old male prostate went creaky and wept some noxious emissions that required periodical mopping up, we’d be more on the minds of the advertising geniuses, and could get equal air time. We’re not sales worthy, bottom line.

  Admittedly, there was a furious burst of advertising activity a while back when Viagra came out, but it didn’t last too long, not even when their competition came out with something that they said was better. How could something that increases erectile function be better? That’s like saying someone is “more pregnant.” Better in this case seems kind of irrelevant. The bottom line is: seven Viagra pills are consumed every second in the USA, according to something I read that pulled sales figures together and divided it by the number of men in this country. All I have to say is that there is some guy somewhere must be using eight.

  Maybe what men need to do is concentrate on the things that we do well, like having heart attacks. We could work on having one like once a month. That’d give Madison Avenue a good working goal. “Men! That monthly heart attack got you down? Does it make you feel ‘not so masculine?’ Want to cure it in three days? Buy our new Kotex anti-seizure pills. Swallow one every morning.”

  The ad could go on to say: “No other cholesterol-absorbing pill will give you the assurance you need to go out there and play extreme contact basketball or lay concrete blocks with the guys all day, and let you eat greasy fried food and drink beer every night.”

  Now that’s an ad. Men would jump at something like that. “I can’t be having a heart attack,” the man gasped as the early responders hit him with 40,000 volts, “I’ve been on the pad.”

  It’s generally agreed that men don’t go to the doctor enough. Maybe Madison Avenue could do something about that by advertising an In-Home Cholesterol Test, or an In-Home Baldness Test. These tests would show you, even when you’re still in your twenties, whether or not you’re going to develop some of these reasons to go see your physician.

  In the back of one of the magazines to which I subscribe is an advertisement that is trying to compete with women. It says: “Hernia appliances for comfort! You too can enjoy heavenly comfort night and day and at work or play! 13 million men know. Ask for our free book.”

  Free book? What the hell do we need a free book for? Women’s sanitary napkins don’t advertise a free book, and that particular design and insertion problem is considerably more complicated than a bulge somewhere below your belly button. You see, right there is the problem: Men with hernias are stupider than women with menstrual abilities. I’m truly shocked by this insinuation. I watch women parade around on television all night with high-tech bras that look like they’d need an engineering manual. They don’t need a book, and they’re trying to assemble this gadget around not one but two bulges.

  Men have to have a book to cover one little one? What would such a book say? This is the front? This is the back? What about before there was a book. Did men run around with this hernia thing on backwards, wondering why it didn’t work? Why they didn’t feel so fresh?

  So here’s the deal: For every feminine ad, I want a masculine one. Every time I see a push-up bra, I want some guy with a big beer belly parading around in his underwear. “I never feel really drunk unless I’m wearing my Hanes.”

  Would someone care to explain a vacuum treatment for impotence?

  §

  Dynamite

  Two well drilling rigs worked steadily in the sweltering Iowa heat, up on the top of the 60-foot-high quarry cliff face. They drilled rows of 60-foot-dee
p holes, into which we would pack three-inch-by-two-foot sticks of dynamite on blast day. These explosives would then, when detonated, blast the limestone cliff face loose so that the smaller rock could be picked up by a huge loader, and dumped into a rock crusher.

  It was 1962, that summer I worked for this rock crushing outfit. It was a good college summer job. A lot of it was boring, and hot, but then came blasting day. Then it was still hot. But it sure wasn’t boring.

  Shorty Buckmeyer was the foreman, a short wiry fellow, not an extra ounce of weight on him. He resembled, in more ways than one, a banty rooster, but one that you didn’t want to cross.

  He acted that way, puffed up, most of the time, except for blasting day, when we had to handle the dynamite.

  TNT fumes make people sick. It gives them—us—headaches; it makes them—us-- throw up. It makes you really, really sick, especially in the summer heat, when the stuff oozes liquid nitroglycerin from its skin. The dynamite of course had to be kept locked up in a special, windowless extra-secure building, and when it was 90 degrees outside, which happened in Iowa easily, it was double that in that building, and the fumes were a big problem for us.

  Anyway, Shorty spent the first part of blast day daring that dynamite to make him sick, and the second half of it throwing up. Some of us joined him. It’s hard for a foreman to maintain leadership qualities when he’s bent over behind a gravel truck barfing. Blasting day was hard on Shorty.

  Shorty and the owner somehow heard about nitrogen fertilizer and fuel oil, and that it apparently made a pretty explosive mixture. Cheap, too. Buy it all at the local Co-op. When he told us this, we thought he was crazy. He said: “Boys, we’re gonna try it.”

  Next thing you know, it’s blasting day, we’re up there on that high cliff face, looking at five rows of sixty-foot-deep bore holes, each row a hundred feet long, with twenty-some holes in each row. The drive of the truck seems confused about what he’s doing up there. Apparently, he thinks we should know. It’s also apparent that we do not. We’re all discussing how much granular nitrogen for the Co-op fertilizer truck to auger into each hole. This particular detail? No one had a clue. We philosophized our way to filling the holes one-third full. One hundred-some holes. One-third looked pretty empty, so we poured some more in. What the heck.

  We arrived at the amount of fuel oil the same way, hosed in ten gallons into each hole, stood around looking down into them, thought they looked pretty dry, dumped some more in.

  Us? With no dynamite to make us sick? We thought we finally had it made. No headaches, no Shorty or any of us throwing up here and there? Pretty easy to take. As we loaded the holes, there was lots of jokes about planting corn in the fertilizer. None of us really thought this was going to work.

  Since each time we blasted—about once a week—the electric detonator cord got twenty feet or so shorter, we drew for short straw to see who operated the plunger on the electric detonator. For once, Shorty lost.

  One thing. You can’t blow all those holes at once, or rock is pushed out across the floor of the quarry. You have to blow the middle and back rows first, so time delay electric caps are installed in the holes. The front row gets the biggest time delay. That way, the front row holds the back rows in place during the blast, and instead of smearing all that rock across the quarry floor—which is a bugger to scrape back up—it kind of piles it up in one big heap. To install the fuses and cap the holes with clay, we took off all metal objects, shoes, jewelry, anything that might generate a static spark. It was a truly hair-raising feeling to walk around up there, knowing how much explosive power lay beneath your feet.

  We got it all fused and capped, and, from what we judged was a safe distance away from the blast, about a football field and a half, we watched Shorty raise the dump box of a gravel truck, climb up underneath it for a shield, hook up the det cord to the electric plunger, and holler: “Fire in the hole.” We could barely hear him, we were that far away, standing in Johance’s alfalfa field.

  His arms went up. Then down. As usual, there was a slight delay between the down of his arms and the blast.

  Then all Hell broke loose. It became immediately apparent that we had way over estimated the amount of fuel and fertilizer necessary for this. As the mushroom cloud formed, we were for once struck silent with awe. Not one smart remark. All summer we had seen blasts. But never never one this big. The air shock wave hit us like a hammer. We were silent, unbelieving at the ferocity of what we had triggered.

  At first the wind blew the cloud away from Shorty, but then it changed and the cloud headed his way. That cloud was pure poison, full of toxic fumes. Shorty took off running, just barely ahead of the cloud. From our position, we found our voices and hollered encouragement. Stuff like: “Run you short-legged little excuse for a rooster!” “Give’er Hell, Shorty!” And so forth. Most of it isn’t printable. We were all glad we hadn’t gotten the short straw.

  It was a grand moment during which no one had quite yet assimilated the size of this blast, nor the fact that we had no doubt just strewn the entire cliff face across the floor of the quarry about six inches thick, a lot of work, hot quarry work.

  I heard something whistle, during all this hoo-rawing. Then a whistle again, slightly higher in pitch. Then yet again. Suddenly, with a great loud !!WHOOOMPP!!, a car-sized boulder struck in the hay field about twenty yards away from us.

  To heck with Shorty. It was then every man for himself, and we all took off running in every direction, as rocks and boulders of all sizes and descriptions rained down on that farmer’s hay field.

  When the dust finally cleared, and we surveyed the scene, we found that the blast, which was in a quarry somewhat at the intersection of four gravel roads, had knocked the REA’s electric wires down in all four directions, had buried the roads in limestone to the point that it took two bulldozers all one day to clear them, and dropped enough rocks and boulders on Johance’s hay field that we picked rock for two days.

  Unbelievably, no one got hurt. Well, Shorty’s pride took a licking, but we cut the next blast dose by over half, and it worked pretty well.

  It was 1962. I was 18 years old. It was very exciting.

  §

  Burma Shave

  SLOW DOWN PA

  SAKES ALIVE

  MA MISSED SIGNS

  FOUR AND FIVE

  BURMA SHAVE

  From 1925 to 1963, it was difficult if not impossible to find an American anywhere who hadn’t seen the Burma-Shave’s individual signs in the ditches along the roads of America.

  Children in a car could be kept ruly for miles and miles by the mere promise that, just over the hill, was another set of signs, better stop quarrelling and pay attention, you’ll miss them. And when they did come, the entire car would shout the verses out loud.

  In 1925, Allan Odell, one of two sons of Clinton Odell, who himself founded Burma-Shave, hammered the Burma Shave sign into the dirt alongside the road from Minneapolis to Red Wing. SHAVE THE MODERN WAY/ FINE FOR THE SKIN/ DRUGGISTS HAVE IT/ BURMA-SHAVE.

  From then until the early sixties, the distinctive and friendly signs spread across America until they seemed to be everywhere. Why? Because they sold shaving cream beyond the Odell’s wildest dreams. Their light-hearted rhymes were a bright spot in the darkness of the depression. Most importantly, the autos of those times were slow enough to allow the driver and the passengers to read the signs. Anywhere there was a straight stretch of road, Burma-Shave’s humor could have your attention for a few seconds, an advertising miracle.

  The signs evolved through the years, moving with the country’s progress. HE PLAYED A SAX/ HAD NO B.O./ HIS WHISKERS SCRATCHED/ SHE LET HIM GO/ BURMA-SHAVE.

  FROM NEW YORK CITY/ TO PUMPKIN HOLLER/ ITS HALF A POUND/ FOR HALF A DOLLAR/ BURMA-SHAVE.

  The war came along, and along came such verses as: TESTED IN PEACE/ PROVEN IN WAR/ BETTER NOW
/ THAN BEFORE/ BURMA-SHAVE. AT EASE SHE SAID/ MANEUVERS BEGIN/ WHEN YOU GET THOSE WHISKERS/ OFF YOUR CHIN/ BURMA-SHAVE.

  As the speed of cars increased, the little signs had to be made larger, and spaced farther apart, so the readers had time to catch them all. Public safety messages began to show up in the little signs, because accidents began to increase. Remember when we actually thought car accidents could be totally erased? We had won the war, harnessed the atom, broken the sound barrier. Everyone saw their children’s lives much improved over their own. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was impossible. All we had to do was give it our best.

  PAST SCHOOLHOUSES/ TAKE IT SLOW/ LET THE LITTLE/ SHAVERS GROW/ BURMA-SHAVE. The little signs raised punning, alliteration, and double meaning to a science, all in the name of safety. And of course raised selling Burma-Shave to a new high.

  When I was growing up, I remember the signs. There were some on Highway 9, in Iowa, close to us. I also remember the “X marks the spot” safety campaign to alert passing motorists to danger spots on the highway. Large white crosses were placed where ever someone had been killed. Burma-Shave got in the act: SPEED/ WAS HIGH/ WEATHER WAS NOT/ TIRES WERE THIN/ X MARKS THE SPOT/ BURMA-SHAVE. DON’T LOSE YOUR HEAD/ TO GAIN A MINUTE/ YOUR NEED YOUR HEAD/ YOUR BRAINS ARE IN IT/ BURMA-SHAVE.

  Soon, there were so many gory clusters of white X’s that the program was abandoned. Deaths didn’t diminish. The crosses did.

  The signs became more stringent: IT’S BEST FOR ONE/ WHO HITS THE BOTTLE/ TO LET ANOTHER/ USE THE THROTTLE/ BURMA-SHAVE.

  And so they didn’t leave women out of it: HER CHARIOT RACE/ AT 80 PER/ THEY HAULED AWAY/ WHAT HAD BEN HUR/ BURMA-SHAVE.

  Car accidents didn’t stop. The only thing that really slowed down in the late fifties and early sixties was the sale of Burma-Shave. They never were able to target the large urban areas where so many people began to cluster. The signs were themselves a sign of a rural era, an era that faded away as people moved to cities. Finally, Phillip Morris Co. bought Burma-Shave in 1963.