STEBBINGS IN THE STOCKYARD

Jim Stebbings is among the several excellent friends I’ve made over the past decade through posts on the listserv for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. A careful scientist, Jim has an endearing fondness for hard physical occupations that probably comes from the early experience he tells about here. This is only a tiny sample of what deserves to be a book. He has carefully researched the subject as well as taking many fine photos. He’s in contact with historical societies, but I’m posting this little taste as a way of encouraging him to put them on a blog or website.


SUMMER WORK IN THE NATIONAL CITY STOCKYARDS,
EAST SAINT LOUIS CIRCA 1955

Following graduation from high school in 1955, I had the good fortune to work the summer in the National City stockyards driving cattle. I worked several additional weeks late in the summer of 1956, following completion of six months army reserve duty. In future years I would often joke that this had been the best job I ever had: outdoors, working with animals, interesting coworkers, and no administrators to deal with. It was not completely a joke.

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To this day, the first visual image which comes to my mind when I think of the stockyards is the cavernous, dim, wood and straw interior of the sheep house.





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When I conjure up visual images of the yards, the first to come to mind are those which first struck a visitor driving into the yards through the underpass on St. Clair avenue: first the raffish, decrepit remainder of the strip of bars along “Whiskey Chute,” far gone into their commercial and physical decay, and then the elegant 19th century-style facade of the Stockyards hotel. Since the stockyards were cut off by rail and road from the neighborhoods of East St. Louis, they were generally only glimpsed in the hazy distance from highway, railroad embankment, or levee as a very large and somewhat puzzling expanse of gray, unpainted wood fading into the distance.




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I don’t remember my part-time coworkers, except as being mostly teenagers like myself. I had known none of them previously. While we socialized casually at lunch, I don’t remember socializing after work. One might assume that, in an environment of relatively unskilled workers and teenagers, that rough behavior might have been noted. In fact I have no recollection of ever seeing excessive locker room play, a seriously escalating verbal dispute, or a fight. The regular workers, as I remember them, seemed responsible, showed up on time and did their jobs well. Language, of course, was often not suitable for the company of ladies, but where ladies were present, in the cafeteria, for example, I don’t remember the language of the yards being used loudly.

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I say all this with some puzzlement now. I was an inveterate reader, had gone to a Jesuit high school in St. Louis, was thin and not particularly athletic, and might have expected trouble. A neighborhood friend of mine, now a Ph.D. physicist, claims that he had to talk himself out of a fight every day for four years in the East St. Louis public high school, undoubtedly an exaggeration but perhaps not much of one. But I recall no unpleasantness whatsoever.



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Very few summer employees worked the more hazardous hog houses; I remember only one fellow, large, quick, and outgoing who did so routinely. We others did so when the rare need arose: I doubt I worked hogs five days in my 4+ months of employment. Sheep, being easy to handle and not numerous, were worked by regular employees (with seniority, I suspect); only twice did I work sheep, and one such occasion I will describe. Otherwise we worked cattle: our job was to collect a group at the end of the weighing scales, and deliver it intact to the recipient.

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Probably not five days out of my months in the yards did I work the hog houses, and I remember little except that it was under roof, and that one had to be much more careful of the animals, spending much more time astride fencing. Here we mostly assisted regular workers in group drives rather than working on our own.



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Memories are clearer of the sheep house, or an least one afternoon spent helping “dip” sheep. Several of us summer workers were involved in an operation to “dip” some dozens of sheep, which involved leading them in a group into a narrowing run, finally narrowing them down to single file, and then, if all went as it was supposed to, because sheep were supposed to be stupid, one drove them around a ninety-degree turn into a narrow water filled trough, which they were expected to fall into before they could stop. Well, these sheep were not as stupid as they were supposed to be, and the great majority halted before falling into the trough. The trough was perhaps twenty feet long or so, and I assume now workers were stationed there to fully dunk the sheep, before they exited on an incline at the other end.

At the halted sheep was mostly where we summer workers helped. We lifted each sheep and heaved it into the water, on a stifling hot afternoon. We had to spell each other fairly frequently: it was smelly, hot, exhausting work. These sheep had not been recently sheared. But it was sort of fun. One rarely in life gets a chance to throw sheep.

Less fun, but far more frequent, was time spent scraping and shoveling shit to clean up the yards. Late in the week, usually Friday, occasionally even we were called in on Saturdays, we would be gathered with scrapers and shovels to scrape up cow dung and shovel it into wheeled v-shaped bins, which could be rotated and dumped to empty. This taught us to hold a shovel properly for heaving loose materials (an invaluable skill in snow shoveling!). This work was not nearly so unpleasant as one might imagine, especially if the stockyards were dry. The yard normally smelled of hay, basically, although after a few wet days they didn’t smell so nice. Shoveling wet, mucky cow dung was harder than dealing with it dry.



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Since many of the cattle were hay fed, and we were often cleaning runways with brick surfaces where numerous cattle had passed, frequently we had to use scrapers to lift what is best described as an inch think sheet of fiberboard, which could come up in very large pieces, some easier to deal with by hand. These were firm and relatively odorless. I had once read in a National Geographic than some African natives plastered the floors of their huts with cow dung, a usage which seemed bizarre to me until I encountered real, hard-compacted cow dung. Not bad flooring at all.

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Very occasionally and unpredictably one saw amazing feats of agility or strength. I still remember one low-slung Hereford bull standing beside a gate near the end of the scale. From the stand he jumped over the gate and moved off. Not on the attack, either; he appeared to just want to be elsewhere.



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One could go weeks without being threatened by animals, that is, charged by them. I think I was probably knocked down two or three times, but only remember details of one instance, as well as details of a really serious threat that did not involve a knockdown. Real threats did not come from the cattle who obviously had blood in their eye: we would be warned by the commission men about those, and they would be handled by as many men as needed. But knockdowns came from cattle who appeared docile but suddenly changed their mind. Although certain breeds were more temperamental, there were so many other animals that most threats in actuality came from common cattle breeds, and, excluding the younger calves, could be of either sex and any age. Older cows had to be watched, as did larger calves, and bulls. The one knockdown I remember was from a bull calf, perhaps 250 pounds, among a large drive of calves milling around behind a closed gate. This calf just suddenly turned around and charged me.

My closest call came from a large Brahma bull standing behind a scale as I returned from a drive; apparently calm, it charged without warning from perhaps ten feet away. I hopped the fence instantly, but instead of making a pass at me as I expected on the basis of experience, it stopped and tried to drive my foot into the fence with its forehead. Fortunately it caught the width of the sole of my army boot just right, and it was not my foot which took the force. When it released pressure to try again, I was over that fence and up onto a perpendicular fence behind it very quickly indeed.



I'll let Jim use the comments to post whatever way he'd like to be contacted if someone wants more information or photos. He has a pretty substantial archive!