JOBS THRU THE YEARS: Grain Bin Builder

there’s a thousand jobs out there . . . and there’s a thousand i don’t want . . .

During that fabled, long-ago, nearly lost to memory summer of America’s Bicentennial in the Year of Our Lord 1976, I was a college dropout freeloading at home to save up money for a year-long backpacking trip to begin in September.

I was persuaded to sign on with my best friend, Greg “Whiskers” Kirsch, to build grain bins in the employ of his father, Clarence Kirsch. Clarence was Benton County’s premier grain building mogul. Greg was his dependable right-hand man who assured me I would “learn the ropes” in no time.

Under Clarence’s taskmaster urgency to erect as many grain bins as possible in a season often cut short or interrupted by rain, heat and assorted delays and supply chain glitches, we were always under the gun and behind the eight ball to get shit done.

Like yesterday!

This was no job for pansies. It was grueling work that toiled on for five, sometimes six days a week, from seven in the morning until — whenever Clarence decided we were finished for the day — or scorching temperatures decided for us.

Even when conditions were tolerable — that is, sub-100 degree days in the hot Indiana summer sun — temperatures inside partially constructed grain bins could reach 110.

Call it Tinker Toy hell.

Crew members, myself included, were often heat-stricken, or maimed by power tools or heavy, awkward, sharp-edged aluminum roofing and siding slats. My salary was $3.25 an hour.

I was definitely low man on the totem pole, and the least skilled, but Clarence must have figured he was doing his son a favor by hiring the McGuire boy on.

I made it through the onerous summer, fit and tanned, before happily departing for South America with my hard-earned savings.

I figured that’d keep me afloat for a year on the Gringo Trail.

As testament to my resolve to save money for my return to college the following year — or perhaps owing to my capacity for self-torture — or maybe it was at Whiskers’ “purty please, Tommy boy” insistence, tantalizing me with a fifty cent raise from the previous summer, that I re-upped for another grain bin building stint during another ball-busting, hot summer in 1977.

I can tell you with assurance that I only stuck it out to the end because Greg was my crew leader, and kept things lively by always cracking jokes, keeping things light, and no doubt covering my ass and carrying my weight or shifting me to lighter duty on occasion.

Thank you, amigo, for two memorable seasons of building . . .

Grain bins and character!